


Cosmology

by eveninglottie



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Allura (Voltron) is a Good Friend, Angst, Because that's what they deserve, Canon is dead we killed it, Demisexual Keith (Voltron), Disaster Gays, Everybody Lives, Fix-It, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, Keith (Voltron) is Bad at Feelings, Lance (Voltron) is a Good Friend, M/M, Minor Allura/Lance (Voltron), Not Actually Unrequited Love, Pining, Pining Keith (Voltron), Pining Shiro (Voltron), Season 7 Canon-adjacent, Season 8?, Shiro (Voltron) is Bad at Feelings, Slow Burn, Spoilers for Season 7, Whump, balanced with a lot of disgusting love shit, comedy?, i don't know her, mostly fluff but a some angst, they're just dealing with their feelings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-11 05:49:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 43,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15965984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eveninglottie/pseuds/eveninglottie
Summary: Keith falls, Shiro heals, and the stars rewrite themselves into a sweeter beginning.“I didn’t know,” he whispered into his knees, the words dragged from his lips before he could stop them. “I didn’t know.”He hadn’t known the depth of his feelings until he’d been faced with a Shiro who no longer believed in him. A Shiro who had done his best to unmake everything they’d built together. He'd been faced with Shiro’s death again and again, and every time he had fought like hell to get him back. Every time, he had come closer and closer to that horrible, incredible, life-shattering truth. He hadn’t known howunlikea brother Shiro was until the word slipped from his mouth for the second time in his life. Until his panicked mind tried to course correct with the truth it had always known, even if Keith had been hiding it from himself.He hadn’t known that he loved Shiro until he’d said it out loud. And it waskillinghim.*Formerly"All The Stars"





	1. trying to find the light

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to Sheithify the last two seasons and fix the one we don't talk about so that's essentially what this is. Just a whole bunch of gay pining.
> 
> Places you can come and bug me to update:  
> | [tumblr](https://eveninglottie.tumblr.com/) |  
> | [twitter](https://twitter.com/eveninglottie) |  
> | [pillowfort ](https://www.pillowfort.io/eveninglottie)|
> 
> All of this is un-beta'd (the only eyes that see this stuff before I post are mine and they're tired) so there are probably gonna be some mistakes and I'm really not interested in hearing about them <3
> 
> [Spotify Playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/eveninglottie/playlist/3gEVSCIDCkmIVSEhw61Nan?si=9aixKDWATcWuE1WC9yVTPA) || [Youtube Playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYYP1CurSOrQN19BJORz1n-v3S1ExXZ_X)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ["Ships In The Night" by Mat Kearney](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCkfTCjF8SM&index=1&list=PLYYP1CurSOrQN19BJORz1n-v3S1ExXZ_X)

In hindsight, Keith should have realized that it would be Lance to bring it up first. 

He should have seen it coming like a fucking ten-wheeler screaming down a highway with its brakes cut. He should have prepared himself, dropped into a defensive position with his blade out and his teeth bared. He should have guessed that Lance, whose impulse control was a faulty tail light on its best days, would be the one to finally pull the damn block out of the jenga tower. Lance, who was deceptively perceptive. Lance, who had more experience in unrequited love than the rest of the team combined. Lance. The asshole. The closest thing Keith had to a friend these days. 

In hindsight, Keith should have realized that he was getting soft. 

They were scouting an abandoned planet with a name Coran had told him more than once but Keith still couldn’t seem to keep in his brain, looking for…something which started with a ‘p’. Or maybe an ‘f’. He’d been distracted by trying _not_ to look at Shiro, at studying whether or not he was truly okay, as he continued to reassure Keith. At judging whether the bags under his eyes were getting lighter or darker. With all his sleeping—sometimes close to eighteen hours a day—he should have been looking better, right? Less pale? He should have been standing up straighter. His smiles shouldn’t have looked so strained. 

Keith had never been good with judging recovery times, mostly because he’d treated them like therapy sessions he’d been forced to attend as a kid with the resident counselor at the orphanage—a good idea in theory, but excruciatingly painful and ultimately a waste of time in practice. How long did it take for a soul to realign with a body after it’d been blasted out into the astral consciousness of a sentient lion robot?

The only benchmark he had was how long it had taken him to feel like a person again after thinking Shiro had died on Kerberos. Months. Six at least. And even then, it was touch and go there as to whether or not his life counted as _living_. Not until he’d seen Shiro strapped to that table, had touched his jaw and looked down on him with his own eyes had he felt like he could truly breathe. 

So no, he didn’t know what the fuck this element was called, or how it was supposed to help the lions recharge, or why he’d been the one to designate search teams and landed himself with _Lance_. Maybe it was his subconscious displaying its customary sadism. Or maybe he just liked Lance. _That_ was a weird thought. But after two years on a galactic space whale with his mother, he was growing used to being surprised by his own desire not to punch everything that looked at him sideways.

He was standing on the side of a cliff streaked with blue and white glowing fungi, frowning down at a deposit of what must have once been the droppings of a creature who’d overdosed on neon corn. He was distracted by the slight pulsing of the air around him. The atmosphere, or something. By the memory of Shiro’s laugh. The first one he’d given since waking up a few weeks ago. Or the first Keith had heard, anyway. Rough, surprised, with an undercurrent of bass which still did strange things to Keith’s chest even after six years. He definitely wasn’t listening to Lance, so he didn’t hear when he went ominously quiet. He didn’t feel the pointed gaze, calculated with Lance’s particular brand of impish nonchalance.

And so he didn’t see it coming when Lance asked, casually, “So how long have you been madly in love with Shiro?”

It was a testament to his maturation over the past few years that he didn’t jump and pitch himself off the cliff to escape this conversation. Instead, he scratched a hand through his wolf’s fur, taking his time to swallow the immediate urge to pick up the space shit in front of him and throw it into Lance’s face. 

Progress. Patience yields—

_Stop that._

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, looking over the cliff to judge how far the next marker was that Pidge had flagged for them to check out. “We should get moving.”

“Yeah, I don’t think we’re going to find any of this phornatonium stuff here. Might as well head back to the lions. But before we do that, I’m going to ask again—how long have you been kindling your fire for our erstwhile fearless leader?”

Keith flicked up his comms array. “Pidge?”

_“Find anything?”_ she answered at once.

“It’s a bust. We’re going to have to keep looking.”

_“Sounds good.”_ There was a pause. _“So...you and Lance have a nice chat?”_

There were times in the beginning of this whole crazy ride where he felt like the rest of the group didn’t want him around. Where he was tolerated, but never truly embraced. All of that had vanished in the few years he’d spent away from them, after he’d realized that he’d been the one holding himself at a distance in a stupid bid to protect himself. 

He’d never felt _betrayed_ by them before. 

“Not yet,” Lance answered breezily. “I think this might take a while, Pidge. Save some of Hunk’s dinner for me, will you?”

_“No promises. Remember, Keith, this isn’t an intervention. It’s a helpful nudge. Honesty is your best play here._ ”

“Pidge,” Keith practically growled. “You seriously don’t want to do this—”

_“No, I do. Lance drew the long straw, though. Trust me, I’m just as upset as you are. Have fun, boys!”_

Keith glared at his wrist, knowing there was nothing he could do about the situation at that very moment, but feeling as if his anger might reach out through the radio waves and strangle that insufferable girl and the demonic grin he knew she was wearing back in her lion. 

“You don’t seriously think the silent treatment is going to get you out of this, right?”

Keith closed his eyes, taking a deep breath, reminding himself that he was better than face-palming Lance into the rock. Such violence was beneath him. Plus, it was probably what Lance expected, and it was one of his few, undiluted joys in life to piss Lance off. 

“How about you tell me what you think I’m supposed to say,” he muttered, finally turning around to see—sympathy in Lance’s gaze. 

Well. That wasn’t what he was expecting.

“Listen, I get that you’re a conceal-don’t-feel kind of guy, but I just think it’ll be better for everyone involved if you offload some of that simmering dramatic tension that’s been making it difficult to stand in the same room with you for the past two weeks.” Lance shrugged, crossed his arms as he leaned against the rock behind him. “You gotta let that shit go somewhere, buddy. It’s gonna give you heartburn.”

“Where is this coming from?” Keith asked in a last-ditch effort to distract Lance. “I’m assuming everyone has been gossiping behind my back. I think I have a right to know what stories you all have been inventing to keep yourselves entertained.”

“First of all, you’re a Texan, so shame on you for abandoning your heritage by using proper grammar for the second person plural. Second of all,” Lance’s eyes grew horribly wide and he actually grimaced _, grimaced_ , as he said, “ _Keith._ ”

“What?” he barked, causing his wolf to butt his head against Keith’s thigh. He reached down to reassure him. To reassure himself, really.

Lance took a moment to respond, expression still hovering far too close to pitying for Keith’s comfort. “Buddy, come on. For all the dark, broody, edgelord energy you’ve got going on, you’re kind of an open book. Also, for all your faults, you’re not actually clueless.”

“Thanks,” Keith muttered, eyes narrowing. 

“No problem. Point being, you’ve got it bad for Shiro. Like, epically bad. Monumentally bad. You’re pining a whole freaking evergreen forest.” Lance smiled, undercutting the tension building in Keith’s sternum. “Speaking as someone who has some experience in these matters, I thought maybe you might want to talk about it.”

He wasn’t wrong. Keith had considered, in his darkest, lowest moments, going to Lance to ask how he’d been able to deal with his feelings for Allura for the past year (three years, damn space whale) and not implode. But that was something that even marginally-better-adjusted Keith couldn’t quite wrap his head around. Going to Lance for help. He’d sooner shove his knife into his thigh.

Keith took a deep breath, sank his fingers deeper into the scruff of his wolf for comfort, and said, “You think I’m in love with Shiro.”

“I think you’re head over heels, truly, madly, _deeply_ , in love with Shiro. Yes.”

Keith’s jaw clenched, but he forced himself to consider Lance’s words as if they weren’t cutting through him like shrapnel. “Right. I can see why you might think that.”

Lance stared, expression morphing into incredulity. “Wow, you’re really going to play it this way. I mean, I admire the commitment—”

“Shiro’s the most important person in my life. He has been for the past six years. He’s the reason I’m the person I am today, so yeah, I love him. He’s like my brother.” Keith thought he should be congratulated for only slightly faltering on the last word. The word which had haunted him for the past two weeks. The word which had made him feel like the stupidest, most idiotic asshole in the entire fucking universe. 

Brother. _Brother_. 

He was a fucking idiot. The problem was, he hadn’t realized until the word literally came out of his mouth how absolutely, dead- _wrong_ , it felt. Like he’d barfed up some kind of weird slimy creature which was now sitting and staring at him in silent, disgusting judgement. 

Apparently, he wasn’t the only one who had a problem with the word.

Lance snorted. “Your _brother_? Uh, so, I don’t judge as a rule. Everyone’s got their own kinks and whatever you think of in the dark of the night when you get your rocks off—”

Keith took a step toward Lance, whose hands came up at once in surrender. 

“All right, all right, don’t bite my head off. I just…” He laughed, holding out his hands in an open-armed shrug. “My dude, you do not think he’s your _brother_.”

“Did you suddenly learn how to read minds while I was away?” Keith snapped, fighting the urge to pace. Pacing was something people did to relieve stress, or because they were agitated. And Keith was neither stressed nor agitated. He was annoyed. And that was all. 

“Okay, so I am going to say something that will probably have you growling at me, but I have brothers. Real brothers. Flesh and blood, from the same womb, brothers.” Lance’s tone was comforting, fond even. There wasn’t a bite or a hard edge to it, which made it harder for Keith to hold onto his anger. Harder, but not impossible. “I know how brothers act, and what they feel like. I love my brothers. But if I were treating my brothers the way you and Shiro treat each other, I think it might raise some eyebrows.”

Keith stared at him, his traitorous mind honing in on exactly what Lance had said. The way he _and Shiro_ treated _each other_. 

Well. That was something, at least. 

Lance sighed, rubbing a hand over his helmet. “Your hand was on his _thigh_ , dude. His _thigh_.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When we got back from getting the first batch of phornatonium, and Shiro had just woken up, and you were cradling him in your arms, your _hand_ ,” Lance pointed in emphasis at the offending appendage, “was resting on his _thigh_.”

Keith blinked. That moment was a blur of emotion and relief and fear. He barely remembered anything except for Shiro’s weight on his shoulder, the steady beeping of the machine reaffirming the fact that he was _alive_ , and not only alive, but _present_. “Oh,” he said, lamely.

Lance threw up his hands again. “I mean, the fact that you don’t even remember, that it was so instinctual, to _rest your fucking hand on his inner thigh_ , just confirms it.” Lance stared wide-eyed at him, shaking his head in disbelief. “Is any of this getting through?”

“You don’t—” Keith wanted to run his hands through his hair, to pull, to get some kind of bearing in this conversation which was quickly spiraling out of his control. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, okay? I love Shiro. For a long time, he was the only family I had. That’s...that’s all.”

It didn't matter that it was the baldest lie Keith had ever told in his life. It didn’t matter that he wanted to scream and rage and defy _himself_ for being so stupidly oblivious for so long. He had to keep saying it was nothing more than familial love.

Because if he admitted it was anything else, that it was anything more, he might not be able to keep going. To keep living and talking and breathing the same air as Shiro, his rock, his best friend, his _world_. Whom he now, unequivocally, knew that he was in love with.

He’d go mad. 

Lance was quiet for a long time, simply watching as Keith gathered himself back together, patient. When had Lance McClain learned how to be patient?

“I tried for a long time to convince myself I didn’t feel any particular way toward Allura,” he said softly, with a distant kind of pain in his eyes. “I told myself I’d be her friend, and I’d support her, whatever she chose. I mean, God, I watched her fall in love with that slimy douchebag prince of shit.” Lance took a moment to collect himself, anger hardening his features in ways Keith hadn’t really seen before. “And it was okay, right? Because she was my friend, _is_ my friend, and I care about her as a person first. But…” He sighed, drooping slightly in his position against the rock. “It took me a while to figure this out, but lying to yourself sucks. It might be more painful to admit the truth, but it’s better than fighting something you can’t really control.”

Keith tried to get angry again, he truly did, but there was something raw and fragile about the look Lance was giving him. Something which cracked the cage Keith had been holding around his heart for the past two weeks. For the past few years, really.

“It doesn’t matter,” Keith muttered, trying to keep his voice level as his heart tried to leap out of his throat. 

“It does.”

“ _No_ ,” he repeated, grabbing on his small flicker of frustration at Lance’s sheer stubbornness, “it doesn’t. It doesn’t change anything. Shiro is—” He had to swallow a lump of panic as he tried to admit it out loud. “He’s in bad shape, still. He doesn’t need… He needs to rest, and he needs to get better. Me feeling a—certain way doesn’t help.”

From the outside in, he could see how ridiculous he sounded. He couldn’t even work up the courage to say it out loud. He was stumbling over his words, his voice was shaking, his entire body was shaking. He was a fucking mess. 

He’d been a mess for two weeks. Standing in the eye of a storm which was constantly threatening to swallow him whole. 

In more ways than one, he still felt like he was hanging on the side of that broken platform, two seconds from plunging to his death, hand gripping the arm of the man he loved, the man he was _in love_ with, the man who had nearly succeeded in killing him. 

That moment of clarity and acceptance as he watched Shiro falling beneath him was the last time he’d felt any kind of peace. Everything since then had been panic-relief-dread-tension-fear—a never-ending cycle of reconciliation that he would not acknowledge. He was frozen in a state of fight-or-flight and he was losing, somehow, by doing nothing. 

“You never told us what happened,” Lance murmured, pulling Keith back from the brink of his own mind. 

Keith looked down at his feet. 

“I know it wasn’t good, from the scar on your face, and the shape you were in when you came back, but…”

He hadn’t really told anyone about it. After the dust from the fight with Lotor had settled, he had gone to his mom, had broken down in front of her. She’d held him, and comforted him, and he’d known that she understood, even without him saying anything, what it had been like for him. That was the best thing about her, really—the way she seemed to understand everything about himself that no one ever really had, not even Shiro. Shiro might have accepted him, and done everything he could to make Keith feel like he had someone to turn to, someone who was there for him and cared about him, no matter what, but he didn’t understand it all. He didn’t understand the isolation and fear, the need to protect himself before he got hurt, the need to never let anyone in, the instinctual, primal, fury Keith felt when he thought about all those nights he’d spent thinking no one cared about him, or wanted him. 

His mom did understand. Sometimes Keith thought his mom understood himself better even than he did. 

Keith just shook his head, feeling Lance’s eyes on him. He couldn’t open up now. Not yet. 

“Have you talked to Shiro about it?”

Keith let out a sharp laugh. “When would I have had time to do that? We’ve been pretty busy the past few weeks.”

“And Shiro’s doing his best impression of a cat these days, I know, but… I don’t know, man, this seems like something you might want to make time for.”

Keith met Lance’s gaze, trying to tamp down on the sudden urge to explain, to say _something_. “I don’t even know what he remembers. He’s been so out of it.”

Lance’s brow furrowed. “You think he’s got amnesia?”

“Maybe.” Keith unhooked his bayard, needing to do something with his hands. He flipped it over and over, like he’d taken to doing with his knife, just to get out the frenetic energy he’d always had. “You saw a bit of what he was like...before. When Haggar—” Keith had to resist the urge to call on the sword, physically clenching his hand before it could emerge in response to the spike of pure, unadulterated rage he felt toward that... _thing_ that had turned Shiro against himself. “I don’t know if he remembers everything, or if he was just watching from the Black Lion, or if he’s got some kind of residual memory imprint from the clone or something. He hasn’t been awake long enough to really explain.”

“You’re right that this is a bitch of a situation,” Lance said, scowling. “Seriously, all of this is… I mean it’s about as weird and convoluted as it can get, and we’ve been put through the ringer the past year. I thought it didn’t get any weirder than sentient plants and mind-controlled merpeople but—”

“ _Lance_.”

“I’m just saying that it’s okay to be fucking confused! We live in confused now, population us, but you don’t get _un_ -confused by bottling that shit up.”

“Eloquent.”

“I don’t think you have any right to comment on my eloquence when the most I’ve been able to get out of you in the past ten minutes is ‘grr, brother, good’.”

Keith slid his bayard back into its holster and punched the rock next to Lance. 

“ _Jesus,_ Keith—”

“I’m fine,” he muttered, shaking out his hand as it pulsed with pain. He hadn’t broken anything, but it helped clear his mind. It was a trick he’d learned when he was young. Punching something usually helped solve whatever was bothering him at the time. It was a mark of his maturity that he wasn’t punching _people_ anymore. “I’m just—”

Still shaking, he turned and slid down the rock face until he was sitting with his head between his knees. He held onto his helmet, trying to hold onto everything else which was bursting to explode from still-bruised mind. 

“I didn’t know,” he whispered into his knees, the words dragged from his lips before he could stop them. “I didn’t know.”

He hadn’t known the depth of his feelings until he’d been faced with a Shiro who no longer believed in him. A Shiro who had done his best to unmake everything they’d built together. He'd been faced with Shiro’s death again and again, and every time he had fought like hell to get him back. Every time, he had come closer and closer to that horrible, incredible, life-shattering truth. He hadn’t known how  _unlike_  a brother Shiro was until the word slipped from his mouth for the second time in his life. Until his panicked mind tried to course correct with the truth it had always known, even if Keith had been hiding it from himself.

He hadn’t known that he loved Shiro until he’d said it out loud. And it was  _killing_  him.

Keith felt Lance settle next to him, far enough away that they weren’t touching, but close enough that they could, if that was something Keith wanted. He didn’t, but he wasn’t sure he’d push Lance away, either. 

“Okay, so you’re a bit more clueless than I thought.”

Keith’s head whipped up to glare at Lance, who was staring out over the neon-planet with something like a smile at the edge of his mouth. 

“I’m sorry, man,” Lance murmured, still not looking at him, giving him space. “That’s… Well, that’s pretty fucking rough.”

Keith’s eyes burned and he looked away, blinking rapidly. “Rough is a word for it.”

“I’m sure there’s some other asshole in this universe who has it worse off than you, but you’re probably top ten. Top twenty, at least.”

Keith let the joke fade without a retort. His wolf settled on his other side, resting his chin on the top of Keith’s head. His heart felt like it was breaking apart, like there was too much inside him and he was about to explode with it all. No one person could contain this much sheer, bristling, _feeling_. No one person should be able to hold onto so much pain. He thought he’d grown used to bottling everything up and shoving it down so deep he never had to look at it. The absence of his mother, the loss of his father, the scorn of his peers, the dismissal of every authority figure he’d ever had the misfortune to serve under. He thought he’d gotten used to feeling like he was worthless and broken. 

But Shiro had fixed him, or he had begun the process, at least. Maybe Keith had done the work himself, but Shiro had shown him it was possible. 

And now Shiro was broken, had been broken for _months_ , and Keith hadn’t been there. He’d left, too wrapped up in his own shit and need to forge his own path, and he’d _failed_ him. 

He didn’t know how to fix Shiro. He wasn’t a fixer. He was a breaker. 

_Broken_ , the word resonated in the back of his mind, like the deep reverberations of a gong. _Broken. Broken. Broken._

He wasn’t broken, not anymore. Or if he was, it wasn’t a bad thing. It didn’t make him any worse than anyone else. 

It didn’t mean it hadn’t hurt to hear, though. 

“What if he didn’t want to come back, Lance?” 

He didn’t even bother to stop his tears now. Some part of him would regret this later, when he came back to his senses and remembered that Lance was a dick, who would probably lord this over Keith for the rest of his life. But right now, he didn’t give a shit. In fact, it kind of helped that it was Lance who was watching him cry. Better Lance than one of the others. 

“He was floating in the Black Lion for so long. I didn’t even stop to think… We pulled him back, shoved him into that body, and none of us… What if he wanted—”

“Stop,” Lance said, his voice soft, but firm. “If you’re going to beat yourself up for something, fine, I’ll help you draft a list, but you don’t get to pull that shit while I’m here.”

Keith’s jaw clenched shut, but he didn’t look sideways to see whatever disapproval hung in Lance’s face. 

“If Shiro didn’t want to come back, he wouldn’t have. You said you talked to him in the Black Lion’s consciousness, right? That he helped you? He was lucid enough to know what was going on, to reach out, more than once. Fuck, he reached out to _me_. He wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t want, in some way, to get out of there.”

“He did that to help us,” Keith muttered, his hands shaking. “That’s what he does. He helps. He saves everyone else at the expense of himself.”

The moment he said it, though, he knew he was wrong. Shiro had a martyr complex the size of a fucking galaxy, but he wasn’t entirely selfless. He’d left for Kerberos, when it might have been easier to stay on Earth. He’d chosen himself when it had hurt other people, Keith included. He could be selfish, even if he usually chose not to be.

“There’s a difference between helping out as a magic space ghost and sliding into the sleeve of your evil clone. Allura said that his soul was rejecting the body, at first. She might have put him in there, but he chose to stay.”

“Sure,” Keith said, self-loathing strangling the words on their way out, “after I begged him, _again_ , to come back. You didn’t hear what I said to him.”

_You can’t do this to me again._

He’d been so out of his mind with panic that he would lose Shiro, after everything he’d done to pull him back from the brink, that he’d fucking _guilted_ Shiro back to life. 

“I think it’s common knowledge that Shiro has a soft spot for you, dude. If anyone was going to convince him to, ah, _live_ , it was gonna be you.”

“That’s my _point,_ ” Keith said, voice cracking as he looked up. His wolf shifted, laying down on his paws and curling his tail around the back of Keith’s legs. “I had to convince him to come back. What if he didn’t want to, and he’s only back because I…”

He swallowed back the sob that was threatening to burst from his lips, clenching his jaw against the tremble. 

“Because he loves you too?” Lance finished gently. 

“He doesn’t,” Keith answered automatically. “Not like…”

_Not like I love him_.

“And you know that because you asked him? Because you talked to him like the adult you now apparently are—fuck you, by the way. In all the crazy that happened since you got back, I never expressed how thoroughly fucking _obnoxious_ it is that you went and got older and taller and more stupidly handsome while the rest of us had to stay the same age. I mean, congratulations on finding your mom and spending time with her or whatever,” Lance added sulkily, “but you didn’t have to be so _extra_ about it.”

Keith managed a weak cough of a laugh. 

“So, okay, you didn’t know you were in love with him,” Lance said in a voice which was more suited to deciding what restaurant they should choose for dinner. “The affairs of the heart are complicated and you’re one of the more emotionally constipated people I’ve ever met, so I can understand why it might have come as a bit of a shock. To those of us on the outside looking in, though, it was pretty fucking obvious that there was something going on there, with both of you. And it wasn’t _brotherly love_.”

Lance patted him gingerly on the knee, pulling his hand away at once when Keith looked up to glare at him. 

“I can’t imagine what you two went through, and I’m not saying you have to recount every terrible detail. But you have to stop thinking that you’re somehow at fault for anything, here.”

“It’s not that simple, Lance.”

“No, it’s probably not, as nothing is simple these days, and everything is a clusterfuck. I mean, frankly, the second the universe decided that us chucklefucks were going to be the _one thing_ which held back the forces of chaos and death from consuming everything good and pure in this world, simplicity was thrown out the window with a single tear and one poured-out drink. I just think it’s pointless to beat yourself up for wanting Shiro to live. And it’s pointless to pretend you don’t love him. Because you do. Clearly.”

“Even if it won’t change anything?” Keith muttered, inching more closely to accepting what Lance was saying. He still wanted to punch him, but the urge was growing fainter now. 

“You said it yourself, Shiro’s out of it. Things might change. You have no idea what the future holds, dude. And since you’re apparently denser than I thought you were, you _really_ have no idea what might change.”

Keith looked at him out of the corner of his eye. “Just like things might change between you and Allura?”

Lance winced, knocked his head back against the rock. “I don’t know, man. I’ve been hopelessly in love with her for a year. And unlike you, I’ve known for pretty much the whole time. It might not be in the cards. She’s… I mean, I’m just this asshole, right?” His voice got faint, expression growing pained. “Why’d she go for a clown like me?”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Keith muttered, sympathy softening his voice. “You’re not entirely hopeless.”

Lance turned to look at him, crooked smile stretching over his mouth. “Keith Kogane, are you about to give me a pep-talk?”

Keith scowled. “I was going to say you’re a good shot, and you’ve marginally improved in your flying. That has to count for something.”

“Wow, this is nice. I feel all warm and cozy inside.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Maybe you and I should ditch Allura and Shiro and—”

“Stop.”

Lance sighed, pulling his legs up to mirror Keith’s posture. “Look, if you can’t work up to talking to Shiro just yet, you should at least try to talk to everyone else. We’re worried.”

A wound which had never really healed inside his chest began to prick and burn. “Why?” he murmured. 

“Because you ditched us for six months and you nearly _died_ two weeks ago. We’re all on the same team, okay? Stop pretending you’re this lone wolf who doesn’t need anyone else.” Lance eyed the wolf at Keith’s feet, frowning. “I mean, literally, you’re not a lone wolf anymore. You found another wolf. The metaphor is so obvious I wonder sometimes if the universe doesn’t have a sick sense of humor.”

A knot formed in Keith’s throat. He stared down at his space wolf, feeling a little like his entire center of gravity had been shifting sideways for the past two weeks, and he’d only just noticed. 

He’d realized, over the long, boring months of time spent on the space whale with his mom, that’d he’d found some kind of family with the rest of Team Voltron. He hadn’t truly understood the depth of his fondness for them until he’d had time to sit and process. Being with the Blades had been nothing but movement, no time to rest and ponder, no time to think about what he’d left behind. He hadn’t thought about Hunk’s cooking and deep-bellied laugh, or Pidge’s dumb little smirk every time she made a particularly ruthless joke, or the way Allura hummed to herself when she got lost in thought, or how Coran would sometimes break into calisthenics when he got bored on the bridge, or how Lance was actually decent company when he wanted to be. 

He’d known he would miss Shiro. That was never in question. He hadn’t known that he would miss them all. More than he ever expected to. 

“This might come as a surprise,” Lance said, casually, “but there are people who don’t hate having you around. Shiro’s not the only one who missed you when you were gone.”

Keith didn’t know how to respond. Everything he could think of was too little, or too stupid, to say out loud. It was easier, strangely, to talk to everyone else when they were in crisis mode, when they had to work together to fight, or to stay alive. This…was still something he was getting used to. 

Lance reached over to knock Keith on his helmet. “Did your wires get crossed or something? Earth to Keith, this is Lance, your new best friend calling, hello, do you—”

Keith shoved him onto his side, grinning a little when he yelped. 

Lance rolled back onto his feet at once though, with a long-limbed grace Keith had always admired about him. “All right, so now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we can go back to the others. The longer we stay out here, the more likely it is that we’ll have to eat some of Hunk’s new fun space animal creations.” He shuddered. “Still haven’t gotten over the worm testicles. Definitely didn’t need to know that.”

Lance held out his hand, smiling down at Keith with a warm, fond smile. 

He bounced back so fucking quickly. It was almost impressive. 

“How do you do that?” Keith asked before he could stop himself. “Just…turn it all off like that?”

Lance’s expression grew pained. “Are you talking about my emotions? I don’t, dude. I just don’t let them turn me into a black hole of angst.” When Keith continued to stare at him, he sighed. “Practice, I guess. Being honest with myself. It’s still a work-in-progress, but I’m getting better at it. Also, it helps, to like, _talk_ to people, and not ignore everyone.”

“I talk to people,” Keith muttered. 

“Your dog doesn’t count.”

Keith rolled his eyes, but reached up to accept Lance’s hand. Almost at once, Lance pulled him into a full-body hug. He fought the urge to shove away, knowing that he could, if he wanted. “This is un—”

“Shh,” Lance murmured, patting his back and hugging him tighter, “just let it happen, man. Just give in to the hug.”

“I’m going to give my fist into your spleen if you don’t let me go soon.”

Lance sighed and pulled away, holding Keith by the shoulders. They were the same height now. It made Keith feel a little better about the situation he was in. “Oh, Keith,” Lance said dramatically, “you might have gotten taller, but you’re still just as stupid as you always were. The more things change—”

“We’re done now.” Keith shook Lance off, whistling for his wolf to follow as he picked his way down the cliff and back toward their lions. 

“If it makes you feel any better, all of us are rooting for you two crazy kids.”

“It doesn’t,” he snapped at once, but it was a lie. It did, in a strange way. Like he wasn’t just going crazy on his own. 

The idea of him and Shiro… It was impossible, and it wouldn’t happen, but just talking about it loosened some of the pressure in his chest. Lance might have been crazy on his own, but if Pidge could talk about it without bursting into laughter, maybe… 

“Have you guys been talking about this a lot?” He couldn’t help but ask, like itching at a healing wound.

Lance nodded as he joined Keith, surveying their surroundings for possible threats. That, too, was new. Lance was usually the first person to fall straight into a trap because he was too busy being ridiculous. Now there was something almost…disciplined about him. 

God, he really had been gone a long time. 

“We’ve got a bet going to see which one of you cracks first.”

And just like that, all the begrudging fondness he’d felt growing for Lance evaporated with a dry puff of smoke. 

“You _what?”_

“Pidge was the one who thought of it first, but Allura’s the one who really got the ball rolling. And before you ask, no, I am not telling you what I think is going to happen, because I know you’ll do whatever’s the opposite just to spite me, even if it means sacrificing your own happ— _hey!”_

Keith stuck out his foot, sending Lance toppling face first into a patch of neon space shit. 

He kept walking as Lance extricated himself and started threatening him with Red’s vengeance. Keith wondered idly if the lion would turn on him in defense of her knew paladin, but he thought not. Red was smarter than that. 

By the time they got back to the lions, Lance still wiping his helmet, Keith was even fighting a real smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am as big a fan as the next person of Shiro and Keith pining for each other from the moment they meet, but I also think about them being struck by THOSE BIG FEELINGS and having no clue what to do with them. Because I stand by the headcanon that while they are very expressive and emotional and have big horrible aching hearts, they're useless.


	2. the two of us went up in smoke

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ["Burning House (feat. Aaron Krause)" by EZA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RMJpr_u6Tc&index=2&list=PLYYP1CurSOrQN19BJORz1n-v3S1ExXZ_X)

The next few weeks went about as smoothly as Keith could hope for, these days. They were captured by Zethrid and Ezor, rescued by Acxa, told they’d actually been in the Quintessence Field for three years, and transported to an alternate dimension where they’d been the puppets of a fickle-yet-ultimately-beneficent all-powerful entity who liked cheesy television shows.

It was, in all honesty, kind of a willing distraction for Keith. It helped to get his mind off the looming question of when he would talk to Shiro about…everything.

Lance had backed off, to Keith’s immense relief and slight suspicion. The others had also seemed mollified with whatever Lance had told them about The Talk, as he liked to say, with scare-quotes and everything. If Keith had to suffer a few sympathetic glances from Allura, stilted, if comforting, compassion from Hunk, and absolutely no further mention of anything from Pidge, bless her tiny demon heart, he would. Gladly. He’d even take Coran’s long-winded rhapsodizing about the power of true love and teamwork every time they all gathered to discuss how they could possibly get to Earth as fast as humanly possible with a grace he hadn’t been quite sure he was capable of. Romelle had started getting this look in her eye that she knew something was wrong, but so far, she’d said nothing. 

He was just hoping that his luck would hold out long enough to get everyone back to Earth. At least then there would be more space (ironically) where he could disappear if everyone decided they were going to take his tragic love life into their hands. The desert was a refuge, even if it hadn’t been a home for a long time. He could park Black behind his little shack in the middle of nowhere and commute in whenever the world needed saving. He already knew his mom liked the place. It’d be great. Totally not weird and lonely.

It would come out eventually, somehow. Secrets didn’t tend to stay secrets in Team Voltron. They tended to get thrown out into the spotlight and forced to unveil themselves until someone started crying. Keith just hoped it wouldn’t be him. 

Thankfully, Shiro seemed completely oblivious to all of it. He was his usual, if tired, self, and Keith decided, like a coward he usually never was, that he might just accept living with the pain of his burning, fiery passion for Shiro for the rest of his life, if Shiro got better, and _they_ got better. 

Because things were, oddly enough, getting back to normal between them. There was the obvious tension, but Keith guessed that it was more to do with Shiro feeling guilty over what had happened than because he’d suddenly remembered everything Keith had said while in a fit of passion and desperation and was now thoroughly uncomfortable around him. Even if it wasn’t, actually, _him_ , he knew the idiot would be taking the responsibility anyway. 

He knew, because he sometimes caught Shiro staring at his face, at his new scar, with such abject pain and self-loathing, only to look away quickly and vanish from the room. It wasn’t like him to avoid a conversation. Normally Shiro was the one who initiated it, but… Well. It wasn’t like he hadn’t been put through hell and clawed his way back to life in the past month. That was bound to make a man want to disconnect. Everyone needed a bit of a break from the weight of the entire universe sometimes. Even Shiro. 

Keith promised himself that he would stop this as soon as he could. When they found time to sit down and talk, he would thoroughly disabuse Shiro of any notion that this was somehow his fault. That Keith blamed him. 

There just…wasn’t time. Or that’s what Keith told himself. Shiro was recovering. He was getting better. Keith was almost able to stand in the same room as Shiro without wanting to crush whatever he was holding at the moment in his hand like a soda can. They were running through the universe on empty and he didn’t want to have this conversation because they were _forced_ to have it. He wanted it to be…good. He wanted to be able to say what he meant, and not stumble over his words like a kid trying to confess to his grade-school crush. He wanted to do it right. 

Problem was, he missed Shiro. He’d been missing him for a long, long time, and having him close and alive and approaching healthy and not being able to reach out was…unbearable. He just couldn’t decide if avoiding him was more painful than forcing a conversation he wasn’t ready to have. The former might suck but the latter could lead to something much, much worse. He wasn’t hoping for reciprocation. He wasn’t that stupid. He just wanted to make sure that Shiro was still in his life. That they could get back to normal. Whatever normal was for them anymore. 

Two days after winning the game show from hell, Keith had found himself rummaging through the crates in Black’s cargo hold, looking for something to eat which came in a wrapper and had not touched any part of Hunk’s ‘experimental’ cooking. The craving had come on like a mad urge after twelve straight hours of flying, his mom finally sending him to bed like a kid because he couldn’t keep his eyes open. He’d tried to sleep, but every time he drifted off, he was bombarded by memories of the cloning facility. The heat, the acrid smell of his own skin burning, the frantic thundering of his heart, the swaying metal under his feet. The smoke, the screaming. 

The alien purple light in Shiro’s eyes. 

So he’d gotten up, moving like a man possessed, and stumbled down to the cargo hold, trying to sniff out something which could pass as junk food. 

His wolf was sitting next to him, watching him with a faint amusement. Or Keith thought he looked amused. It was hard to tell, sometimes, if he was actually just dog-adjacent, or if there was more going on behind those glowing eyes. Clearly there was something more, or he wouldn’t have done what he did next, which was wink out of existence.

“Bring me back a snickers,” Keith muttered, climbing up over the crates to see if Pidge had stashed anything in the air vents. He’d once found an entire bag of jolly ranchers in her backpack while out on mission, so he knew she was a hoarder. She’d also hinted that she’d made “upgrades” while he was away, so he was hoping she might have forgotten something while she was working. It might be a stretch, but he was tired and the faulty logic wasn’t an obstacle for him. He just needed something to do. He couldn’t spar with his mom while she was sitting vigil with the lion. He’d already polished and sharpened his blade. Twice. He was quickly running out of options, and he didn’t want to start his next chapter with Black by repeatedly banging his head on her walls. 

Balanced on one of the crates containing hay for Kaltenecker—five in the Black Lion alone, and he couldn’t find one fucking chocolate bar—he was reaching up to carefully unscrew the grate, when he heard his wolf wink back into existence. 

“Any luck on that candy, bud?”

His balance was a bit off, but he managed to get two of the screws loose before he heard a jarringly familiar voice answer him.

“I think your wolf got confused about what you were looking for.”

Keith jerked around, for an insane second thinking that the wolf had learned how to speak and had chosen the voice of the one person he was purposefully trying _not_ to think about, and caught sight of Shiro standing there next to his wolf with a soft smile. He wavered, hands hovering in the air without a hold, and felt himself topple forward as the crate lurched under him. 

The one thought which hung in his mind as he flipped over and smashed ass first into a mound of broken wood and hay was that Kolivan would be so, so disappointed in him. Six months of training, of honing his body and mind into a cutting, keen blade, and he was going to die impaled on a crate of hay because he was looking for chocolate. 

He was not impaled, the paladin bodysuits were strong enough to deflect bullets even without the outer armor, but he did bruise his ribs and his tailbone, causing him to let out a hard, strangled grunt as he finally came to a stop under a pile of hay. “Ow.”

“Keith?” Shiro said, urgent, and with a panicked tone which did not match the current situation. “Keith, are you okay?”

“Fine,” Keith muttered, the word coming out as a groan. 

“Keith—”

“I’m fine,” he said again, wincing as he got up. Only to freeze when he saw that Shiro was much closer than he had been only a second ago, with his hand already outstretched and reaching. 

Shiro hesitated, leaning back just a bit when he saw that Keith was okay. “That was…impressive. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you jump like that.”

Keith blinked and paused in the act of brushing himself off. He looked up, and honed in on a slight smile pulling one side of Shiro’s mouth into a grin. 

“You almost did a double flip,” he continued, his voice low and steady even as his expression brightened. “Maybe next time don’t flip _into_ the crate, but—”

“Funny,” Keith muttered, trying to hide the rush of blood to his cheeks as he straightened and shook himself off. “Laugh it up.”

“Seriously, did you hurt anything?”

“Just my ego.”

Shiro snorted, the sound going straight to place where Keith kept all of Shiro’s laughs, hoarded them like they were tiny, precious gems. 

He did his best to shake most of the hay out of his hair, but he knew from the way Shiro was staring at him, like he was trying hard not to smile, that he’d been unsuccessful. 

“I realize Hunk’s cooking has left a little something to be desired lately, but I think you might be jumping the shark by breaking out the hay already.”

Keith scowled as he rotated his shoulder against the pain blossoming there. “I wasn’t trying to eat the hay.” He looked back at Shiro, and almost immediately regretted it. 

He was in a tank top and sweatpants, and his white hair looked mussed, as if he’d just gotten woken up. There was a gentleness to the way he was blinking his eyes too. 

It was the first time in nearly three years that he’d seen Shiro soft from sleep, and it did something funny, and horrible, to his heart. 

Keith realized with a lurch that he’d just spent the better part of thirty seconds staring at Shiro, when the wolf raised sat up to nose at Shiro’s hanging fingers. 

“Did he…wake you?” Keith managed, watching Shiro pet his wolf. 

The wolf hadn’t taken to everyone on the team. Pidge was his favorite, but he seemed rather apathetic toward everyone else. A fact which the others, mostly Lance, took to mean that Keith had specifically warned him off making friends. Like he was somehow interested in keeping him all to himself.

Keith hadn’t done anything of the sort, but he also wasn’t going to force the wolf to bond with other people if he didn’t want to. 

So the fact that his wolf was cozying up to Shiro like they’d been friends for years was… It was fine. Totally fine. To be expected, honestly. Shiro was friend-shaped, of course his wolf would like him. 

_Oh my god, just stop thinking_ , he told himself, looking up to see Shiro staring bemused down at the wolf. _Just stop…all of that. Please._

“I wasn’t really sleeping. Just, zoning out.” Shiro met his gaze, eyes narrowing at once. “How about you?”

“Fine,” Keith said at once, inwardly cringing at the overly forceful tone. “Yeah, I’m good. Or, I wasn’t sleeping either.”

Shiro stared at him in that way he always had when Keith was avoiding a subject, as if he were looking _through_ Keith, as if he could see past all the bullshit and read his mind. “Mind if I ask what you were doing? I realize I kind of barged in…”

Keith rubbed the back of his neck, looking down at the shattered crates, and the air vent now hanging open over their heads. “Ah. I was…” _Dear fuck, this is painful_. “So I was looking for something to eat. I just…wasn’t trying to eat the hay.”

“Did the wolf not bring you dinner?”

“No, he did.” 

Shiro grinned. “Right. I get it. It’s…”

“Disgusting.”

Shiro hummed in a nonverbal agreement. “Did you say you sent the wolf out for…candy?”

“I didn’t send the wolf out for anything,” Keith muttered, trying not to linger on the idea that the wolf realized he wanted something, and he brought him _Shiro_. “He kind of does what he wants.”

“I’m getting that.” Shiro was still standing in the center of the cargo hold, watching Keith carefully. “Actually…” 

He stepped toward the back wall, looking speculative. The wolf started to go after him, letting out a small whine, before he looked back at Keith, who could do nothing but shrug with a vague, sympathetic grimace. His ass was still smarting, and he was trying hard to keep standing up straight.

Shiro knelt down by the lockers, bringing up an interface Keith hadn’t know was there, and keyed in some kind of sequence. His brow raised as, to his sleep-deprived mind, Shiro opened a secret compartment and produced a black bag seemingly out of thin air. 

“I completely forgot about this,” Shiro said, rising and holding up the bag to Keith with a wide smile. “I think your wolf might have been on to something.”

Keith’s mind scrambled for a moment in the face of Shiro’s excitement and landed on the last coherent thought he’d had. “I did not know that was there.”

“Yeah,” Shiro laughed, dismissing the interface and sliding the compartment shut, “well I had a lot of time to get to know Black well while I was floating in her consciousness.”

Keith flipped through a few responses, but none of them seemed to fit the strangeness of the idea that Shiro had been privy to all the secret snack compartments in the Black Lion because he was a quintessence-ghost. 

“Kidding,” Shiro said, offering Keith the bag. “I stashed this awhile back. Figured it wouldn’t hurt to have a supply ready, in case something happened and I got stranded again.”

Keith took the bag, opened it, and had to fight a conflicting swell of emotions. Shock. Fear. Disappointment. Acceptance. “Shiro, are these…some kind of _hot cheetos_?”

“Look, I asked Pidge to get me stuff from that mall you guys went to when I was trying to commune with Black. I wasn’t going to complain about what she brought back for me.”

“There are two empty bags in here.”

A beat of silence. 

“Okay so I might have specified.”

Keith looked up at the man he loved, the man he respected more than anyone else in the whole universe, the man whom he would move the very stars to save, and tried to reconcile him with someone who willingly ate hot cheetos. 

“Do you want them or not?” Shiro asked, pulling the drawstring bag back and emptying out its contents on a crate. “Because I don’t _have_ to share, you know. Maybe your space wolf wants some—”

“He is _not_ eating those things. Are you trying to kill him?”

Shiro began to laugh, a small sound formed around his words as he perched on the side of one of the still intact crates of hay. “They’re not that bad!”

“Hunk would start crying if he knew you ate these.” Keith watched Shiro’s features soften, watched the way a bit of weariness begin to pull off his slumped shoulders, and fought a horrible flicker of heat at the base of his chest. 

“Well, I’m going to have some. I’m also going to have these mystery flavor not-pocky. And you can just stand there and watch me eat.”

Keith didn’t move, judging which choice would be more painful—not sitting next to Shiro and trying to play off avoiding his space like it wasn’t weird, or sitting next to Shiro and pretending he wasn’t painfully aware of the fact that Shiro was wearing his pajamas and his tank top highlighted his chest and shoulders in a way which felt like a personal attack against Keith.

It shouldn’t have been weird. He’d seen Shiro in less than this, much less. The Garrison had had communal showers, and they’d been sparring together for years before they even joined Voltron, so this shouldn’t be a problem. 

Of course, he hadn’t known he was in love with Shiro until about three weeks ago. And like everything else he now had to realign, he was finding it very hard not to stare in abject appreciation of Shiro’s…everything.

“You’re not actually going to just watch me, right?”

Keith cleared his throat, feeling the backs of his ears burn. “What kind of pocky are they?”

He felt Shiro’s gaze follow him as he sat down and crossed his legs, close enough that it wasn’t awkward, but still far enough away that they wouldn’t accidentally touch. His tailbone throbbed and his ribs gave a little flutter of defiance, but he would not let that show on his face. Shiro had a tendency to get concerned very quickly, and he didn’t think he could handle Concerned Shiro all up in his space. Happy, Hot Cheeto-eating Shiro was enough to deal with on its own.

“I don’t know.” Shiro held up the box. Sure enough, Keith recognized the picture, but the lettering was in some weird alien script he had no hope of understanding. “The biscuits are dipped in something blue. I wasn’t willing to risk it.”

“But you’d risk an ulcer from the hot cheetos.”

“You’re really hung up on these— _damn._ ”

Keith looked up in surprise—it was rare to hear Shiro swear when he wasn’t already worked up over something else—and saw him struggling to open the bag single-handed. 

“Do you mind…” Shiro asked, his voice strained, not meeting Keith’s eyes. 

Keith took the bag at once, ignoring the slight jolt of feeling when he brushed Shiro’s fingers. 

Shiro exhaled a laugh. “Thanks. I’m still getting used to this.” He waved his hand toward his right side, where his arm ended just below his shoulder. 

“No problem,” Keith murmured, setting the bag down between them. 

Silence expanded between them again, punctuated by the sounds of Shiro slowly eating, and Keith hated the way he almost expected it now. They’d never been wildly enthusiastic conversationalists, but there’d been a comfort in Shiro’s presence, a steadiness, that had never led to awkwardness. It had always been easy, even when he was a little punk used to being either ignored or reprimanded by everyone who deigned to talk to him. 

Shiro had always been home for him. And now that home felt like it was slipping through his fingers. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, flipping the box of pocky over in his hands to do something, to distract himself from the yawning hole in his chest. “About your arm.”

“I’m not.”

Keith couldn’t help but look up again, holding at the sincerity in Shiro’s eyes. 

“It was never really mine,” Shiro said, expression growing rueful. “It never felt like mine, anyway. It was useful, and I appreciated it at times when we needed the firepower, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t miss it. I’m…” A furrow appeared in his brow. “I’m relieved, honestly. What Haggar did to me—it’s never going to go away fully, I know that, but having that thing gone is a step in the right direction. I’m grateful, Keith.”

Throat tight, mind wrapped up in the sound of his own name in Shiro’s voice, he just nodded. 

Shiro grinned. “I doubt I’d be much help to you all in my condition anyway. It was as good a time as any to lose an arm.”

“Are you feeling any better? You look—,” _perfect,_ “better.”

Shiro’s smile went distant. His posture grew strained, the cheetos abandoned as he looked down at the floor. “Some days are easier than others. It’s…weird. The clone body is mine, but it’s wrong. There’s stuff missing. Scars they didn’t bother giving me. Like the one on the bottom of my foot when I stepped on a shard of glass as a kid. A burn on the inside of my left elbow. I even had a mole on the side of my neck that just…isn’t there anymore. Every time I look at myself, and I expect to see things, and they’re just…not there.” His voice hardened, and Keith was struck by the way the dim, overhead light of the cargo bay seemed to sharpen Shiro’s features, make them more severe, more remote. “I got so used to being nothing and everything in Voltron, and now I’m _something_ , but it’s…it doesn’t feel like mine. It doesn’t feel like me. It feels like I’m still dreaming and everything is just a few degrees starboard of normal. Like I could wake up tomorrow and it would all just vanish. And I’d be dead again.”

And because Keith was watching now, paying attention to every shift in his expression, every minute change in his posture, he saw the slight tremble in Shiro’s hand where he was clutching his knee, the feather of the muscle in his jaw. “Shiro—”

“It’s not all bad.” Shiro laughed again, and this time Keith didn’t take it as a little sign that things were getting better, he saw it for what it was—an attempt to lighten the mood, to distract from the brittle tone of Shiro’s voice. “The clone didn’t have the disease that would have grounded me in a few years and made it nearly impossible for me to walk or fly. At least if the body is an improve—”

“ _Shiro_ ,” Keith repeated, setting down the pocky box and grabbing him by the shoulders. Shiro went tense all over, and Keith should have let him go, he should have given him space, but the voice shrieking in the back of his head, the voice which had never really left the cloning facility, would not let him. “Hey, _hey_ ,” he murmured when Shiro’s eyes were locked on the ground between them. He moved his hands up on instinct, braced on either side of his neck. “Look at me, Shiro.”

It took him a second, but when Shiro met his gaze, Keith felt something electric shoot through his skull and down the full length of his spine. Shiro’s eyes were wide and soft grey, the same color as the desert after a heavy rain. 

His chest went tight and hot all at the same time, and he had the feeling that he was tipping forward into those eyes, that whatever Shiro had brought back with him from the inner quintessence of Voltron, it was catching, and he wouldn’t mind drowning in it if he never had to look away. It was the same feeling he’d had in that Garrison tent three years ago when he saw Shiro lying on a metal gurney when he should have been dead. The same need to protect, to save this man who had done so much for him. To be there, like he’d been there for Keith. It wasn’t familial. It was primal. And it consumed him.

Lance was right. He was fucking clueless. 

“ _This_ is your body,” he managed, voice rough with everything he wanted to say, but couldn’t, because there was still fear in Shiro’s eyes, and he didn’t need a confession—he needed a friend. He tightened his grip, trying to pour everything he felt into the grounding touch of his hands. “ _Your_ body. It was always yours. It was made from you, and you have every right to live in it now, you hear me? I can’t—” He faltered when he saw moisture gathering at the edge of Shiro’s eyes, but barreled on. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now, but the fact that you’re here, that you had the strength to come back from literally _dying_ , is incredible. It was never your arm, or your body, that made you who you are. It was _this_.” He pressed his right palm to Shiro’s chest, hard enough that he could feel the strong beating of his heart beneath his skin. “ _This_ is what makes you a hero and a leader and the best man I know. This is what makes you incredible. And you still have that. You always will.”

And maybe it was that moment which solidified things for him. He was in love with Shiro, yes, and definitely had been for a long time, but it didn’t change anything. It was just a different way of framing what was already there. It was a shift, not a sea change. A translation of the bond he’d already formed with a man who had saved him, in all the ways a person could be saved. If he needed to be just this, forever, he would be. And he’d be happy. He’d be fucking grateful.

Slowly, and by degrees, Shiro’s expression cleared. The knot in his throat bobbed. His lips parted as he stared. 

His hand rose to press down over Keith’s where it sat against his heart, bigger, but not by much, anymore. “Keith…”

The feeling hit him again, like a piercing flame to his gut—not pleasant, but almost welcome, like he’d shoved his feelings down for so long that now they were turning against him—and he pulled away. A red print stood out on Shiro’s too-pale skin above the metal end of his shoulder. He hadn’t realized he was gripping him so tight. 

For a moment, Shiro’s fingers tightened over his, like he was trying to hold Keith’s hand, but then it was gone. 

Great. He was imagining sensations now. Just great. 

“Eat your gross cheetos,” he muttered, holding out the bag as he leaned back. 

The sound of the plastic crinkling was almost painful in the sudden silence. 

“Thank you,” Shiro murmured. “That was… Thank you.”

Keith nodded, busying himself with tearing open the pocky, forgetting for a moment that neither of them knew what flavor the sticks had been dipped in and he was essentially taking his own life into his hands because he couldn’t bear to look at the man he’d just _fondled_ in an attempt at a pep talk. But they were in his mouth before he knew was he was doing and his teeth were coming down and—

“Huh.”

“Any good?”

Keith surveyed the stick, narrowing his eyes down at the blue something which coated the biscuit. “Yeah, no, these are terrible.”

Shiro laughed. 

“I think Pidge was trying to poison you. These have to be dipped in some kind of engine lubricant.”

Out of the corner of Keith’s eye, he watched Shiro lean back and let out a long, happy sigh. Maybe there was something hitched about the sound, and maybe his eyes were still too bright, but the tension was gone. Keith would settle for that. 

“You remember when I tried to show you how to fix your hoverbike and you accidentally punctured a fuel line?”

“And I swallowed half a tank of gas? Yeah.” Keith slid the pocky back into its box, placing it high enough away from the space wolf’s twitching nose that he wouldn’t get any ideas. “Only the way I remember it, you _thought_ you knew how to fix my hoverbike, and when I tried to argue with you and tell you how it was supposed to be fixed, you elbowed me in the kidney, and I nicked the fuel line.”

“That doesn’t sound like me at all.”

“Right, you were a model student and instructor. How could I forget.” Keith’s mouth twitched. “I also remember the time you got drunk and thought it would be a good idea to go for a cruise-ride over the dunes at midnight and you didn’t know anyone else who would sneak out of the Garrison to pick your ass up.”

“Yeah,” Shiro sighed, grinning, “you were always there to save me, Keith. Should have known back then that I would want to keep you around forever.”

_Damn it._ He had to clear his throat of the horrible wobble in his voice before he said, “We save each other. It’s our thing.”

For a moment, there was just the crinkling of the bag, and the distant, metallic hum of the lion as it sped through the eternal blackness of space. 

“I suppose—”

“Sorry to interrupt, but Pidge just contacted us.”

Keith didn’t jump this time, though he did tense at the sound of his mom’s voice. He looked up to find her leaning in the door of the cargo hold, looking at him, and then at Shiro, and then back at him, in the way he’d come to recognize as a look which meant that she was calculating battle strategy and tactics for every possible outcome of a theoretical fight. 

She lifted her brow at him, and he frowned, confused. 

“In addition to wondering where Shiro had gone to,” she slid her gaze to Shiro, curiosity in every line of her sharp face, “we are apparently running out of power. We need to find a place to rest and refuel.”

Tamping down on the strange instinct he had to defend Shiro’s presence—it wasn’t weird, they were, as far as everyone else was concerned, just friends, and his mom was not the kind of person to draw conclusions or overstep—he nodded. “We’ll be right up.”

“Actually,” she straightened, pacing into the room, “Shiro, would you mind leaving Keith and I alone for a moment?”

Shiro cleared his throat, looking from his mom to Keith, a slight tension in his expression. “Ah, sure, if that’s okay with…Keith?”

Keith had to fight a smile as he nodded. “Yeah, of course.”

“Right. Well.” Shiro stood, looked down at the bag of hot cheetos he was still carrying. “I’ll just take these with me.” He got all of three steps before he stopped and held the bag out to Keith’s mom. “Unless, you’d like some?”

Keith had the strange feeling that he was watching some kind of weird territorial dance as his mom looked down at the bag, flared her nostrils, and leaned a few inches away. “I think I’ll pass.”

Shiro laughed, the sound still hitched. “I’ll go…uh, tell Pidge where I went, then.”

Keith forced himself not to watch him go, trying to stretch out his bruised back without drawing his mom’s attention. 

“Looks like you had a bit of fun down here.”

His gaze flicked up, and he frowned. “This was an accident. My fault.”

She gave him a long, searching look, but settled next to him. “Did you get any sleep?”

“No,” he sighed. “I tried, but…”

A long, graceful hand came up to cup his cheek, moving slowly to pull out pieces of straw still lodged in his hair. 

Keith actually closed his eyes when he realized that he’d had that entire conversation with Shiro while looking like a hillbilly from a B-list movie. 

“I know some meditation techniques to quiet the mind, if you’re interested. It might help you get to sleep.”

“Meditation?” He cracked open his eyes to look at her incredulously. “Really?”

“Don’t discount it until you try it.” Her mouth twitched, and her eyes softened as she brushed back his hair. “I can’t say I’m surprised that Kolivan didn’t train you in deescalation and relaxation. Disappointed, but not surprised.”

“Yeah, not a deescalator. I only go one way and it is not…down.”

She pulled her hands away, crossing her arms as she looked him over. He could tell she saw exactly what was bothering him, had probably guessed along with everyone else, since he was _apparently_ so obvious, but she didn’t ask. It only made him more proud to be her son. “You two have a good talk?”

“No. Yeah. Maybe.” He slumped over and buried his head in his hands. “I don’t know.”

“Give it time, Keith.”

“I’m giving it time. I’ve given it lots of time. I have no more time.” He folded over more thoroughly so that his forehead was now touching the crate, pain beginning to pound in his temples. “I think I might be very tired.”

“Want me to carry you to your bunk?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Maybe your wolf can help out.”

“No, he’s a traitor. We’re not friends anymore.” A warm, furry mass crowded into his space, nosing under his chin, forcing him to straighten up or be licked to death. “All right. I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry.”

The space wolf simply stared at him, blue eyes glaring as if he were trying to impress a point that Keith was missing. 

“Come on, on your feet.” His mother helped him up, hovering when he teetered precariously as his tailbone protested the sudden change in posture. “Approach the situation with clear eyes. After you get some sleep, you can help me work on new simulations for your team.”

As Keith moved back up to Black’s head and sat through a lengthy conversation about where they could stop for a day or two to recharge, he actually looked forward to the prospect of waking everyone else up to run drills. Simple pleasures. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Keith, five minutes after Shiro leaves: oh my god he touched me with his hot cheeto dust fingers I have to go die now
> 
> I added the Slow Burn tag because lol I don't know what I expected.
> 
> Hey come say hi to me on tumblr because I've been screaming about Voltron for like a month and no one I follow/talk to watches the show or knows why I'm so upset. I'm [eveninglottie](https://eveninglottie.tumblr.com/) over there too <3


	3. I get up again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ["The Comeback Kid" by The Midnight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tFsOkDsWyk&index=4&list=PLYYP1CurSOrQN19BJORz1n-v3S1ExXZ_X&t=0s)

Objectively, Keith had always known that Shiro was beautiful. He’d heard the other cadets whisper about how attractive he was, all quiet confidence and strength, a smile which felt like a warm hand clasping your arm, shoulders so broad they could block out the sun. He’d even once heard another kid in passing whisper that Shiro’s ass was so tight someone could bounce a quarter off it, but that was before Keith had slammed the kid into a trash can to dissuade him from further objectifying Shiro, and people had kept their mouths shut around him. Hindsight. Fucking 20/20. It wasn’t that he hadn’t seen the appeal. He had. It just hadn’t mattered that much to him.

Takashi Shirogane, model student, hero, icon, dreamboat. Whatever, Keith had thought at the time, knowing that Shiro was actually a nerd with a reckless streak and a penchant for eating cheez whiz out of a bottle, and so much more perfect and flawed than everyone thought he was. The beauty was just another facet of his person. Another reason to love him.

And it hadn’t taken him too long to figure out men were his preference, even if he’d never participated in those idiotic little rituals at school or the orphanage where kids clutched pathetically at each other to try and work out their own confusing desires. He’d always wondered if maybe he wasn’t built the same way, didn’t have the same manic urges and blossoming sexual appetite that every other boy seemed to have as he grew up. 

So when he heard people drooling over Shiro, someone who had lodged himself firmly and irrevocably in Keith’s heart as the only person left on Earth whom he could not live without, he’d dismissed it. Shiro was beautiful, sure, like a sunset was beautiful, like a comet streaking through the clear night sky was beautiful, like the sound and feel of a newly serviced hoverbike under his legs as he revved the engine and felt raw power kick through his gut was beautiful. 

Shiro was beautiful. Handsome, even, if Keith wiped away everything he knew of the man underneath and looked only at the powerful body, the cut jaw, the quiet, self-assured grace of his movements, the gorgeous, kind, grey eyes. Objectively, he knew this. 

It wasn’t until his feelings for Shiro had crystallized into a very specific, very dangerous, kind of longing did he realize that Shiro was not just beautiful, he was _breathtaking._ As in Keith was finding it more and more difficult to be in the same room as him and not just stare at him in blind, all-consuming lust while he struggled for breath. 

This fun new layer of difficulty to Keith’s already tenuous grip on his own sanity was laid out in full, excruciating detail the day Shiro started exercising again. 

They were still stopped to recharge on an asteroid in one of the last systems of a populated galaxy before they would head off into their first truly maddening stretch of empty space. Pidge and Coran didn’t expect them to encounter another planetary or celestial body for nearly a week, and all of them were a little anxious. A little eager to unwind before they were all trapped in their lions. His wolf could only alleviate the claustrophobia so much with teleporting them back and forth. It would be hell, so they were making as much of their free time as possible.

They’d made a little camp for themselves, everyone stretched out in the open air of an asteroid that was roughly the size of Pluto and still somehow had a serviceable atmosphere of oxygen. Allura had produced a blanket from her lion and was laying down on her stomach next to Lance. Lance, to Keith’s immense surprise, was handling himself like a gentleman. He seemed to be having an actual conversation with Allura, and he’d even seen her laugh a few times. _Good for you, buddy_ , Keith thought with a smile as he went through a set of easy exercises to loosen his tense limbs. Pidge and Hunk were trying to reconfigure a radio to see if they might be able to boost their signal. They’d still been unable to contact anyone on Earth, and the Voltron coalition had gone frighteningly silent. Even the Blades had disappeared. 

Keith had tried not to think of the worst possibilities, but it was difficult, especially when he saw his mom’s hard, distant gaze. He knew she was worried. She had every right to be, he just wished he knew how to comfort her. She’d done a lot for him the past two years. He should be able to reciprocate somehow. He looked over at her now, patiently coaching Romelle through basic combat training. Romelle wasn’t bad, actually. Keith could see that she had an instinctual talent for it, and her strength seemed to be even greater than Allura’s. He watched her nearly flip his mom over her knee, before she was pinned in a lightning fast maneuver, knife falling from her grip as she let out a string of colorful curses. 

Coran was off hunting for food, a fact which Keith thought might be a practice in insanity, if the old loon hadn’t already found three bird-shaped creatures which Hunk had pronounced were eerily similar to chickens, just a frightening shade of fake banana yellow. 

And Shiro… 

Was nowhere to be seen. 

Heart lurching into his throat, Keith straightened up and looked over the ridges around them. They’d landed in some kind of valley, actual grass, albeit pink, under his feet and the smell of what might have been a kind of pollen on the wind. “Shiro? _Shiro?”_

Lance looked up at him, frowning. “Why are you spinning around like that, dude?”

“Does anyone know where Shiro is?” Keith paced across the campsite, trying to get a better elevation to survey the surrounding hills. 

“Oh,” Allura said, twisting around and sitting up. Beside her, Lance threw Keith a dirty, murderous look for distracting her. “I think he mentioned going for a run.”

“A _run_?” Keith snapped, wheeling on her. “And you just let him go on his own?”

Allura’s expression turned just a bit disdainful. “I’m not his keeper, Keith. Neither are you.”

“I didn’t—that’s not what I meant.” Keith forced his voice to smooth. “I just meant that he’s still recovering. He might not be ready to push himself that far.”

“I think he’s a better judge of that than you—”

Keith ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “Shiro is the _worst_ judge of his own capabilities.”

“You know, Keith has a point,” Hunk said from where he was sitting next to Pidge, looking pensive. He scratched under his headband with a screwdriver. “I once watched him try to lift 200 kg of water without help when we were doing the Voltron Relief Tour. Pulled his back out and couldn’t move for three days.”

Keith gestured at Hunk while staring down Allura’s growing concern. “See?”

“Keith, please calm down,” Pidge said, not looking up from her console. “He took Kosmo with him, and told me he’d be back within half an hour. It’s only been twenty minutes.”

Keith went rigid, something replacing the fear which was splintering cold through his chest, something which felt eerily close to affection and just a bit like hope. “He took…the wolf? My wolf?”

“No, the other wolf we found out in the black void of space.” Pidge deigned to look at him over the top of her glasses. “Yes, he did. So you can relax and stop shouting.”

“Who’s shouting?”

Keith did not look over his shoulder right away, still wrapped up in the idea that Shiro had taken Keith’s wolf with him on a run, and so he caught Pidge’s widening eyes, felt the stirrings of something ominous approaching, before she murmured, “Might have been premature about the relaxing bit.”

Keith turned, and for the third time in as many minutes, his brain short-circuited.

Shiro was jogging back toward them, Keith’s wolf at his side, and—he was not wearing a shirt. 

In fact, he was only wearing a rather tight-fitting pair of under armour leggings, and sneakers, and _nothing else._ His chest and stomach were on full view, glistening with ribbons of sweat, and flushed just slightly pink from exertion, pants hugging his hips just under the ridge of his pelvis. He was breathing hard, muscles expanding and contracting as he came to a stop beside Keith. Up close, Keith could not help but see the veins in his neck, the way his white hair curled, damp, under his ears, the way his pale skin was splotchy with pumping blood, highlighting a few errant moles across the left side of his chest. 

He could also _smell_ him, and instead of being just a bit disgusted by that fact, he caught himself wanting to lean in so he could memorize the scent—sweet, deep, a curling of something rich under the normal smell of sweat, and just a hint of whatever soap Shiro was using. Presumably the same soap that Keith was using, which only conjured more images and ideas of how Shiro was using said soap, and at that point Keith had to physically restrain himself from leaning down and _licking_ _Shiro’s chest._

“Oh my god, I think he died,” Hunk murmured, and only because Keith’s hearing was just slightly better than a normal human’s did he hear Pidge’s reply. “Keith.exe has ceased to function.”

Shiro, oblivious and looking like a fucking greek _god_ , took a deep breath. “What was that?”

“Nothing,” Keith said, so quickly he was pretty sure it had sounded more like ‘ _nhhng’_.

Shiro’s brow creased, tilting his smile, causing Keith’s heart to do a wild, suicidal leap out of his chest. “You okay?”

And then, in a move that was clearly meant as a killing blow, Shiro leaned over and braced himself on Keith’s shoulder. 

Some part of Keith, probably the Galra part, wanted to retaliate at once. Shove Shiro back and pin him to the ground, because there was something so _deliberately offensive_ about Shiro touching him while he was glistening in sweat and his stomach was doing this quick flutter to display its intricate musculature, like a tease. And while he was pinned on the ground Keith would cement his victory by shoving his tongue so far down Shiro’s mouth he could lick his tonsils. 

The rest of Keith, the parts of him which were still human-shaped and youngish and entirely bamboozled by the strength of the desire coursing through him, had frozen in horror at the stirring of heat in his crotch. 

“Keith was worried,” Pidge called, shattering the moment of horror and turning it into something closer to mortification.

Shiro straightened up, his grip tightening and _Jesus fucking Christ, Shiro was actually trying to kill him again_ because his expression grew serious and sincere in a way that made Keith want to melt into a puddle of space goo. “Really? Why?”

Keith’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. He didn’t know what he expected, really, as the only thing going on in his brain at the moment was a kind of high-pitched wailing. 

“He was concerned about you pushing yourself too hard.”

Shiro looked at Pidge, giving Keith one blissfully wonderful moment where he was able to take a small breath before he passed out from lack of oxygen. 

“Oh. Oh, right,” Shiro murmured. And then his gaze refocused on Keith and Keith struggled to remember that this man, this _god_ , was also his best friend and one of the most important people in his life and thinking about him braced over Keith with those damn perfect shoulders and maybe moaning a bit was both inappropriate and, frankly, masochistic. 

“Probably should have told you first,” Shiro added, sheepishly.

Keith just hummed, trying desperately to remember how to form words. Words first, sentences later, and then maybe he could string something along to make a coherent thought. 

“You know, I think you were probably right to worry.” Shiro sagged a bit, and that motion shook Keith from his temporary paralysis. 

His hands went out at once, one bracing lightly against Shiro’s side—his sweaty, beautiful side, where Keith could feel the quick inhale and exhale of breath and the faint pulse of heart under his ribcage—the other hovered somewhere around his chest. As if it knew without a doubt that the moment he touched one of those perfectly rounded pecs, he would die. “Are you okay?” he managed.

Strangely enough, his voice sounded normal. Even. Not like he was having trouble not swallowing his own tongue. 

“Yeah, I’m just out of shape.” Shiro laughed, gulping down one more long breath and smiling at him. “You’d think I’d been floating bodiless in a void for the past seven months.”

Silence. Keith was too busy wrestling his own heart into submission at the brilliant smile on Shiro’s mouth. At what it might feel like to taste that smile. To lick the contours of his mouth to memorize the shape.

There were a few weak laughs from the peanut gallery, and Shiro’s expression grew pained. “Yeah, I think I might have pushed it a little.”

“You should take someone with you,” Keith murmured, ignoring the huff from his wolf. “Just in case.”

Shiro’s grip tightened again, in a reassuring way which made Keith’s knees want to buckle. “You’re right. I should.” He looked at Keith, something fragile and raw in his eyes. “Don’t suppose you’d be—”

“Yes,” Keith said at once, because he’d never had a great sense of self-preservation and there was no reality in which Keith would not insist that he accompany Shiro on every run for the rest of his life.

Shiro smiled again, and released him. “Right. I’m gonna hit the showers. And then take a nap. God,” he shook his head, “I never thought I’d see the day I grew tired of naps, but…”

He took a few steps away, and Keith had to physically restrain himself from reaching out and pulling him back. His shoulder actually felt cold without Shiro’s hand. 

“What’s the ETA on food, Hunk?”

“Ah,” Hunk said, looking with a strange amount of determination at Shiro and not, specifically, at Keith, whose hands were still floating vaguely around the space Shiro had just vacated, “whenever Coran gets back. An hour, maybe?”

“Great,” Shiro said with a sigh, rubbing his neck almost self-consciously. He gave everyone a bright smile, and if he lingered on Keith for a moment longer than everyone else, Keith refused to think about that too much. 

Keith should have looked down as Shiro walked back to the Green Lion, as he gave the wolf a fond scratch as he passed, but instead he just stared at Shiro’s back, honing in on the two perfectly spaced dimples where his hips met his— 

A pebble hit the side of Keith’s head, causing him to jerk sideways. “What the—”

Lance was grinning up at him from the blanket, eyebrows waggling. “Just wanted to see if you were still with us, bud—”

Keith lunged for his water bottle and chucked it so hard at Lance’s head he might have worried he was going to give him a concussion if he hadn’t ceased to feel any kind of affection for the asshole. Instead, Lance threw his arms up at the last second and the water bottle broke, drenching him. Allura gave a small cry of protest, launching up and out of the way before too much hit her as well. 

Lance, though, was now dripping, and still somehow smiling. “Listen, if you need to take it out on me—”

Keith’s knife was in his hands and shifting into a sword before Lance could finish. He wasn’t actually going to hurt Lance. He just wanted to scare him. Scare the shit-eating grin off his face. 

“Really?” Allura sighed, rolling her eyes as she braced her hands on her hips. “I thought we’d gotten past the phase where we threatened each other with bodily dismemberment on a whim.” 

Pidge, too, called, casually, “We can’t form Voltron without Lance, Keith. You can’t maim him too bad.”

Lance, wisely, had stopped talking, and was watching Keith with a healthy amount of fear. 

“I _will_ kill you,” Keith muttered. “Say one more smart thing, and I will kill you.”

Lance’s face scrunched in annoyance, eyes darting from the sharp end of Keith’s sword to his face. “You’re not actually going to kill— _FUCK_.” 

Keith straightened and shoved Lance to the ground with his foot, turning on his heel and moving as quickly as he could manage out of the campsite without sprinting. 

“Now, where are _you_ going?” Hunk called.

“Training.”

Lance snorted, all the fear gone from his voice. “Is that what the kids are calling it these— _ow_ , stop, _Allura_ —”

“Leave him alone,” Keith heard Allura say in a loud whisper, only to raise her voice and add, “You want any company, Keith?”

He didn’t answer, though his wolf popped into existence beside him after a few seconds. He trailed a hand through his fur, trying not to think about Shiro doing the same thing only a few minutes before, trying not to think of Shiro showering, and trying to tamp down on the uncomfortable feeling that his body was now a dangerous, foreign entity determined to make the rest of his life a living hell.

 

— ✩ —

 

It got worse before it got better. 

Keith was up and ready to run with Shiro the next morning, having slept not at all the previous night. He’d never really felt the need to jerk himself off before. It had been a nice thing, sometimes, that he did when he was bored, or when he’d spent too long in training and needed to offload some of his pent-up energy. He didn’t subscribe to the ideology that young men were sex-crazed horndogs. Or _he_ hadn’t been. 

Now, however, he was starting to reconsider things. Maybe it was something that sprung up on people unawares at the worst possible moment. Like a rash. He had lain awake most of the night trying to recite the flight manuals he’d learned by heart when he was a Garrison cadet, anything to stop his mind from exploding into wild fantasies of Shiro, of what he wanted to do to Shiro, of what he wanted Shiro to do to him. 

He felt like he was wrestling a wild animal, trying to tamp down on a sudden and overwhelming wealth of desire that did not care about him or his complicated relationship with the object of said desire. It was a single-minded thing, and it was hungry. 

And Keith was just a bit frightened by its potency. 

When he saw Shiro the next day, morning-soft with hair a bit rumpled, stretching outside the Green Lion as Keith trudged slowly down to meet him, he nearly just turned around and went back to bed. Did he _have_ to run without his shirt on? How had Keith never seen him run without his shirt on before? They’d trained together plenty of times before, they’d sparred, they spotted for each other, they’d spent countless hours together, and Keith could not for the life of him remember whether or not Shiro had ever _not_ had his fucking shirt on. He must have taken it off sometimes, but he was pretty sure he would have remembered _._ Half-naked Shiro was a thing that was now branded to his mind. Half-naked, sweating Shiro. 

Jesus _Fuck_.

After the initial awkwardness of Shiro asking what was wrong with him, as he could no doubt tell by the stilted conversation and bags under Keith’s eyes that he hadn’t slept well, they transitioned into a necessary silence. Because Shiro really was out of shape. Whatever toll implanting his soul into his new body had taken on him, he was still struggling to return to his previous, near-perfect state of fitness.

Keith went slower than he normally would have, but he could tell it was bothering Shiro. He’d gotten so used to reading Shiro’s facial expressions for everything he never said because he thought he’d bother someone, because he thought he shouldn’t show weakness to anyone else. The little tension in his jaw, the way he kept his eyes forward, rather than let them wander. The flaring of his nostrils to keep his breath contained. 

When they stopped for a water break at the base of a hill which peaked up into the rising sun, one of the rising suns—this was a binary star system—Keith watched Shiro out of the corner of his eye. He tried to look past the parts which were making him grateful he’d chosen a longer, looser shirt to wear over his under armor that morning—not because he was hard just looking at Shiro, but because he didn’t trust himself not to get too excited over a small smile and an errant brush of wind—and saw…frustration. 

Shiro was frustrated. Trapped in his own head. Upset. Keith would know that look of steely tension in his eyes anywhere. 

Keith handed him his water bottle, which was actually Lance’s water bottle which he’d taken that morning as payment for having to deal with Lance’s…everything, and muttered, “You’re being too hard on yourself.”

Shiro took his time, and Keith failed in looking away from what swallowing did to the knot in Shiro’s throat. “No such thing these days.”

“Wow. Could you be a little more dramatic?”

His mouth twitched as he handed Keith back his water bottle, fingers warm and damp from sweat and condensation. “You and I both know that whatever’s happened in the last three years, it wasn’t good. We should have gotten word from Sam by now.”

Keith crossed his arms. “Yeah. I know.”

Shiro hadn’t been the only thing which kept him up last night. Silence was so much worse than bad news. Silence meant the news was so bad, they couldn’t even figure out a way to call for help. 

“We’re heading home to something bad, Keith. I can’t slack off now.” Shiro’s voice was hard, barely more than a whisper. “I need to be some kind of help to you all.”

“Hey,” Keith said, frowning, “give yourself a fucking break. You were just—dead.” He stumbled over the word, stomach dropping for a moment, before he continued, “You’ll recover. You’re going to be fine. Plus, we’ve still got a year left until we reach Earth. Plenty of time to get back in fighting shape.”

Shiro’s smile was distant, like he appreciated the encouragement, even if he didn’t believe him. 

A thought occurred to Keith, something which might go horribly wrong, or…

He swallowed his own desire and placed his hand on Shiro’s shoulder. Shiro startled, just a little, and looked at him. With a little thrill, Keith realized he didn’t have to tilt his chin up so much anymore to meet his gaze.

“How about we compromise,” Keith said slowly, mouth pulling up into a slight grin. “If you can beat me to the top of that hill, you can run yourself as ragged as you like, and I won’t say another word.”

Shiro’s eyes widened, confusion swallowed by a flicker, just a hint, of his old playful edge. The edge of the man who’d flown off a cliff at full speed, who’d spent too many nights sneaking off the Garrison grounds with Keith to watch the stars, who’d smirked every time he beaten Keith when they were sparring, who’d broken every record before he was eighteen and then broken them again before twenty-one just to prove to himself that he could. “Oh, yeah? You—”

Keith shoved him and took off. It was a tall hill, and would have been a challenge at a light jog, but he could tell that Shiro needed a kick in the ass, and Keith was barely winded. 

He didn’t slow himself down anymore, but pushed, sprinting, relishing the burn in his legs and the heavy thunder of his heart. It’d been a long time since he’d ran just for the fun of it, just to feel the ground move under his feet and feel the wind blow back his hair. There was a thrill to it, like the thrill of revving a hoverbike, or dropping into a freefall while flying. 

Maybe he’d done this for Shiro, but he was beginning to feel like maybe he’d needed it too. 

He crested the hill, the full, lovely sun shining blue and bright over the swaying pink grass. Light arced across the horizon in a wave, and for a moment, he just stared, not quite able to believe that he was standing on an asteroid in a galaxy whose name he didn’t know, looking at a sunrise which had never been seen by human eyes before. Three years in space, and he still had trouble sometimes believing he wasn’t that lonely kid trapped in an empty desert. 

The moment was cut short, however, by 100 kg of rippling man flesh slamming into his back and throwing him to the ground. He rolled a few times before he remembered that he wasn’t just a bag of water and bones, and managed to slip free from Shiro’s bulk enough to stop them both. With a grunt and an easy flip, he dug into the dirt with his knees, pressed down on Shiro’s shoulders, and pinned him in place. 

Both of them were breathing heavily, and in a rush of conflicting emotions, he remembered that the last time they were this close, Shiro had been trying to kill him. But then the physical memory of so many nights spent sparring with Shiro before he’d left for Kerberos and then in the Castle of Lions rose up and washed the small prickle of lingering discomfort away, and it was normal. About as normal as it could be between them, these days. 

“What was that for?” Keith said, rough as he tried to control his breath.

Shiro let his head fall back against the ground. With a jolt Keith felt pressure release from the back of his right calf—Shiro’s hand where he’d been gripping him. “You cheated,” he said slowly, grinning, a wild, reckless light in his eyes only heightened by the rising sun. “Asshole.”

“Not my fault you weren’t quick enough to catch me, old man.”

Shiro laughed, still gazing up at Keith with a kind of tired, begrudging awe. The sound bubbled up out of his lips, coloring the air with its exuberance. Keith watched him for a moment, before he shook his head, smile spreading over his lips. “You’re such a dork.”

Shiro only laughed harder, actually jostling Keith where he was still braced over his chest, straddling his waist. Keith supposed he should be freaking out at the sudden, absolutely dangerous lack of space between them, but he just…didn’t want to distance himself from any part of the joy leaking up out of Shiro. It was like a delirious cloud, making him feel light-headed and dizzy, like he was getting drunk on just the sound. Finally, he just gave in, letting the laughter roll through him as well. He ducked his head, letting his forehead rest against Shiro’s chest. 

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew this was crossing a line. A line it would hurt to draw again when Keith needed to. But there was just…something simple in the gesture. As if it were the logical next step in this weird little dance they were acting out. Sharing laughter. Sharing exertion. Sharing contact.

Shiro had shared so much of himself in those first few years. So much that Keith had wondered sometimes if he wasn’t reciprocating enough, if he ever could. Now, galaxies away from those people they’d been, Keith still felt like he was holding himself back. Except this time, he wanted to just…let it go. Let it all go. 

It took him a moment to realize that Shiro had stopped laughing, that he was just laying on the ground under Keith. That his hand was resting softly on Keith’s back. 

_Too much. Definitely too much._

Keith forced himself to roll off Shiro, ignoring the flicker of conflict in every limb of his body which wanted him to stay exactly where he had been. But he was just a red-blooded Korean-American man, apparently as horny as everyone else. He could only take so much before his control unwound completely. 

The clouds stirred in the wake of a fast-moving comet over their heads, churning the colors of space into blue and gold and pink. Like pigment diluted in water. 

Keith listened to Shiro breathing beside him, still a bit hard, a bit heavy, but slowly evening out. His own heart was racing, but it wasn’t due to the run.

“What do you miss the most about Earth?”

Shiro’s voice was quiet, low, like a subtle vibration through the ground. 

Keith forced himself not to see what expression he was wearing, if it was wistful, or determined, or something else. 

For a long time, the only thing he’d missed was his father, and the absence of a mother who had left him before he’d even gotten a chance to know her. His adolescence had been shaped with people-sized holes. And then Shiro had left him as well, and Keith had given up on the world he’d tried to reenter. 

Now…he would always miss his dad, his rasping laugh, the way he made bacon and smoothed out his paper every morning before he drank engine oil coffee. The smell of his aftershave. But it didn’t hurt as much as it used to. His mom had slowly began to fill the hole she’d left him with, and it was rare these days that he felt abandoned by anyone. 

Shiro was there, next to him. Close enough to touch, but… 

He missed the person he used to be with Shiro, he supposed. The man who didn’t hesitate. Who didn’t constantly second-guess himself. Who didn’t worry, all the time, if one word would send him vanishing into smoke as a mirage or illusion. 

His fingers moved before he’d realized where they were heading. His pinky nudged against Shiro’s hand, the touch sparking with light. 

“The sound of the cicadas in the summer,” he muttered, trying not to let his wild-beating heart leak into his voice. “I miss how the quiet had weight. Space is just…empty.”

For a moment, neither of them moved, Keith’s pinky still resting gently against Shiro’s thumb. 

And then Keith felt fingers move under his, thread together and hold. It was a loose hold, one Keith could easily break, but it was like all the receptors of his hand had burst into overdrive. He could feel the roughness of Shiro’s skin matched against his own calluses, thick fingers where his were tapered and thin. 

“Yours is better than mine,” Shiro murmured, his voice humming through the connection forged in their hands. 

“If you say something stupid like ketchup—”

“Cartoons.” Keith could hear the smile in Shiro’s voice as he continued, “Though, now that you mention it—”

Keith closed his eyes. “What show?”

“Hmm?”

“What cartoon show?” Keith snorted. “The best and brightest Earth has to offer and he can’t pay attention for more than a few seconds.”

Shiro squeezed his hand, sending a jolt of electricity through Keith. The wind blew a piece of hair over his face, but he remained perfectly still. If he didn’t move, maybe the moment would stretch on forever. He could lay here with Shiro without feeling like he was fighting himself, fighting a force of nature, really, and just…exist next to him. Share the same air. 

“You ever hear of _Sailor Moon_?”

Keith’s brow furrowed. “Are you talking about the anime? From last _millennium_?”

“Yeah.” Shiro laughed. “It came out in 1992, I think.”

“That’s…really old, Shiro.”

“It’s dated, sure, but it’s… I don’t know. I used to watch it with my baachan when I went over to her house as a kid. It’s really good.”

“I think I’ve seen the remake.”

“Which one?”

“Uh. Whichever one the orphanage could afford. Not sure.”

Silence for a beat, and then, “When we get back, I’m going to sit you down and we’re going to watch the original. The whole thing, all the way through.”

Keith’s chest tightened so quickly he had to force himself not to react. Shiro said it so firmly, so _sincerely_ , like there was never any question that it would happen. 

He’d always been like that. Planning. Two steps ahead. Confident in the future and whatever it held. Even when he thought he was going to die and leave Voltron to Keith, he’d been sure. 

Keith had never looked forward with that kind of confidence. Knowing that there would be something waiting for him, no matter what happened. He’d never had the luxury. Before now. 

“That sounds nice,” he murmured, when he was sure he could manage an even tone. 

“Keith?”

“Yeah?”

“Are we…okay?”

Keith forgot himself for a moment and turned, eyes flicking open at the slight shake in Shiro’s voice. 

He was looking up at the sky, expression frozen in something like fear. 

“What?”

“I wouldn’t blame you if we weren’t. I’m—surprised you can even look at me, honestly. After everything I did—”

“That wasn’t you,” Keith said, voice coming out harder than he’d intended, so hard it made Shiro look at him in surprise. 

For a moment, they just stared at each other, Keith fighting the urge to sit up, to move away, to do something with his body that didn’t involve him just staring at Shiro while he worked through whatever was going on in his head. 

“I don’t know if there’s a difference, in the end.” A pained smile crossed Shiro’s face. “If the body’s mine and I remember everything, I think it comes down to semantics.”

The words fell like pebbles into the still surface of Keith’s chest. 

_Remember everything_. 

He felt his lips open, his eyes go wide. 

He remembered. 

“It’s been coming back in little chunks,” Shiro muttered, hand clenching around Keith’s almost unconsciously. “Allura thinks the memories were imprinted into the body, and that’s why… I believe the word she used was a palimpsest. Like an after image. One minute, I remember nothing except floating in the Black Lion’s consciousness, and then I remember sitting in the Castle of Lions, talking to everyone, even though it wasn’t actually me. The memories…they’re like vids in my head I can’t turn off. They keep coming and coming, and every time I think they’re done, they get— _worse_.” Shiro’s voice broke, and he sat up, trying to slide his hand away from Keith.

But Keith sat up with him, some part of him unable to let go of his hand. If he held on to Shiro through all of this, if he just held this piece of him back from the emotion building in Shiro’s voice, he’d be able to save him. 

Shiro was hunched over, his large frame shaking as he stared at the ground between his bent legs. He didn’t try to pull his hand from Keith’s again, but it was trembling too. 

“All of you have just decided to forget what I did,” he said, voice low and rough in a way Keith had never really heard before. Only an echo, in room which was now destroyed along with the Castle of Lions. “I know none of you hold it against me, and I’m grateful, I am, I just…” He dipped his head, exhale catching on a sob. “Maybe you should.”

“Shiro,” Keith murmured, rising up on his knees and moving directly in front of him, chest aching with the sounds Shiro was trying hold back. “Shiro, you weren’t in control. That wasn’t—” 

“But it _was_ me.” Shiro’s eyes were wide and hard on the ground between them, shining with unshed tears. His body was held taut even as he shook, as if even in this he was trying to hold himself together. He cried like it hurt, like he was unused to it, and didn’t know how to accept that it was happening. 

Keith knew the feeling. Or he had, before he’d met Shiro. 

“She—Haggar told me what to do, but not how to do it. That was me. Everything I said to you. Everything I _did_ to you…” Shiro finally looked up, something manic in his eyes, something like desperation. “Keith, I’m so—”

Keith was bad with words. He always had been. He was a man of action, of reaction. Of moving as fast as he possibly could so that he never slowed down long enough to get tripped up by the past or the present as he sprinted toward the unknown and bleak future. It was one of the reasons he’d been able to trick so many people into thinking he didn’t care. 

He cared so _fucking_ much about Shiro, he had no words which could express what he felt deep down in his bones. That there was nothing Shiro could do which would be unforgivable in his eyes. He’d handed over his heart the moment Shiro had told him he would never give up on him, and yeah, it’d been battered in the intervening years, hurt so badly he’d thought once or twice that he might go mad with it, but the single, unassailable truth he knew beyond anything else was that Shiro had never intentionally hurt or abandoned him.

And so Keith moved forward, part of his stupid brain urging him to do the wrong thing and kiss him right there, which would probably do more damage than good, and hugged him. He pulled Shiro into his chest, held him as close as he could without hurting him, and said nothing. 

Because there were no words for what he felt, and he didn’t think he’d be able to say them anyway. He’d fuck it up somehow, like he always did. This was better. This was easier. He hugged Shiro, felt the man shake in his arms, the man who had once been Keith’s entire reason for existence, and tried to put everything he couldn’t say into his embrace.

He just hoped it was enough. 

For a moment, Shiro was frozen. Keith’s brain flipped through possible reasons for it before deciding that he was just going to ignore them all. The silence stretched on for a long time, long enough for Keith to wonder if maybe Shiro didn’t want this. If this was over the line, the stupid, ragged line between friendship and something…else. Something more.

But then, a whisper, “Keith, I’m so _sorry_.”

Keith tried to pull back, to see Shiro’s face, when a large arm moved behind his back and locked him in place. Tremors ran through Shiro’s body, a shuddering, painful unwinding as he let himself cry. Wet soaked into the shirt on Keith’s neck, and he held on tighter, moving one of his hands to cup the back of Shiro’s head. 

The hair was still damp at the nape of his neck, and Shiro still smelled of sweat and soap, but all Keith could think about was how much his heart hurt as he listened to his best and oldest friend cry. 

“I know,” he murmured, swallowing back his own knot of pain, shutting his eyes against the burn which was starting to prick them. “It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay. We’re okay. Always.” Shiro started to shake his head, but Keith held firm. “You don’t get to take the blame for this. So what if it was you saying all those things, if you were the one who thought of them? I know you didn’t mean them. I know you would never hurt me if you could help it.”

“It doesn’t—”

“Let me finish, Shiro,” Keith said insistently, trying to keep his own voice from breaking. “I _know_ you didn’t mean them because you stopped yourself, in the end. You pulled yourself out of whatever that witch did to you. You fought back.”

A beat of silence.

“After you chopped my arm off.”

Keith’s eyes flashed open. It was hard to tell, through the ragged tone of his voice, but Shiro might have been joking. It was laced with self-loathing and pain, sure, but there it was, under everything else. A joke. 

Keith swallowed the nerves in his throat, the lingering knot and tension. “The first day we met, I stole your car. You always knew I was trouble.”

A laugh. Hitched and wet, but a laugh nonetheless. “I’ve always been fond of a little trouble, myself.”

Keith tried not to let his reaction filter down into his body, but he couldn’t help the slight twitch at the oddly playful remark. He remembered another question, asked by another Shiro, months and months ago in a dark room in a castle which no longer existed. 

_How many times are you gonna have to save me before this is over?_

He leaned back, finally letting Shiro go. His face was still hard, as if he were in pain, and there was a single line of moisture down his left cheek. Keith fought the urge to brush it away himself. 

“I meant what I said,” Keith muttered, voice rough though he tried to make it light, easy. “Never means never. You’re gonna have to try a hell of a lot harder to get rid of me.”

Shiro took a deep breath, and met Keith’s gaze. The wind stirred the white curl of hair over his forehead. “About that,” he murmured, something unidentifiable in his eyes. 

Keith’s chest clutched with fear, irrational, maybe, but fear nonetheless. 

“I want you to know that I’m—honored.”

He let out an exhale, disappointment chasing on the tail of relief. _You knew this was coming_ , he told himself, trying to keep his expression clear of the conflict in his heart. 

Having Shiro as a brother was more than he’d ever thought to hope for. He should be grateful. 

“Thank you for coming with me today,” Shiro added, looking uncomfortable as he wiped his face on his arm and leaned back. 

Keith hadn’t realized they were still close enough to touch. Too close, really. Even though there would always be a part of him which never wanted to stop touching Shiro, not because he was in love, but because he’d lost him too many times to chance letting him go again. 

But there was still the matter of Shiro being shirtless. Keith didn’t need to punish himself too much.

“I know this is…hard for you,” Shiro said after a while. “I appreciate it, is all.”

Keith frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“You’ve been avoiding me, Keith.” Shiro’s smile was understanding, calm. “I don’t blame—”

“I haven’t been avoiding you,” Keith said before he could stop himself. 

It was a lie, and Shiro knew it was a lie. He was big enough not to push it, but Keith could tell by the lingering tension in his eyes that he knew. 

God, Keith had been too busy freaking out about his own feelings to realize that Shiro needed him. _Fuck_ his feelings. 

“I haven’t meant to,” he added, looking down at his own hands. He picked at the edge of his glove. “It wasn’t you, really. It was… I’m not used to being around so many people. It was just me and my mom for a long time. I guess I just got used to the silence.”

Partly true. Mostly false. But there was nothing else to say that didn’t involve him confessing his undying love to Shiro, and that was not an option anymore. 

Shiro was honored. That would have to be enough. It _was_ enough. 

“I forgot how…overwhelming all of this could be. All of _them_ could be.” He motioned back in the direction of the lions.

Shiro was watching him closely, with that long, steady look which said he knew something was up, but he’d let it go. Instead, a smile slid over his mouth, and his voice was soft as he murmured, “In all the chaos, I never really… Keith, I’m so happy for you. Your mom seems like an amazing woman.”

Keith felt his own mouth twitch, and he grabbed onto that feeling of pride and wonder he still felt, after two years of knowing he had a mother. That he wasn’t actually an orphan, but was loved. “Yeah, she is.”

A moment of comfortable silence spread between them. 

“We should probably get back,” Shiro murmured, making to stand, before Keith grabbed his hand. He looked down with wide eyes, brow furrowed. 

Keith forced down the feeling of heat and longing and tried to remind himself that he’d need to get used to this, if he was going to be in Shiro’s life. 

“I think we can chance a few more minutes,” he said, trying for a smile. 

Shiro just stared at him, so long that Keith wondered if he’d crossed a line. But friends touched all the time, didn’t they? Friends hugged. Friends held hands sometimes. 

Truth be told, the only friends Keith had ever had besides Shiro were the other paladins, and he couldn’t trust them to be the normal examples of anything. Shiro certainly touched him a lot, even back in the beginning. Touch was fine. Touch was normal. 

Even if it made him want to throw himself off the nearest cliff. 

Shiro let out a shaky laugh, and nodded. “Okay.”

Keith sat down next to Shiro, bringing his knees up so he had something to hold onto instead of reaching for his hand again. 

The first sun began to dip once more over the asteroid’s horizon, lengthening the pink shadows of the grass around them. As his sweat dried and his heart quieted, Keith tried to figure out a way of being beside Shiro which he could happily perform for the rest of his life. A way of fitting into his life, a way of keeping him in his.

“Keith?”

A slight flicker of warmth in his chest. Better. Not great, but better.

“Yeah?”

“You know how important you are to me, right?”

Keith was too busy listening to beat of his own heart to focus on the strain in Shiro’s voice. 

“Yeah. I do.”

If part of him wanted more, wanted to _be_ more than simply important, he quieted it with a patient hand. 

This was enough. Of course it was. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise this won't be _just_ long, important conversations. I just really like writing these, and I feel like they need to lay a bit of a foundation for renegotiating their relationship before they dive straight into the kissing and love-making. Also, talk to me about Demisexual/Ace-spectrum Keith who only wants to bang once he's got Mad Feels. 
> 
> Sorry for taking so long to get this one up, guys. I've been in a crappy headspace the past week, and writing has been a constant battle of convincing myself this fic is not a steaming pile of shit. <3 Love you all <3


	4. why are we running

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ["Cosmic Creatures" by Anadel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjt9VVeG7YE&list=PLYYP1CurSOrQN19BJORz1n-v3S1ExXZ_X&index=5&t=0s)

For as long as Shiro could remember, he’d been fighting a losing battle against his own body. 

Since the day he’d turned eight and the doctor had sat him down with his parents and in hushed, calming tones told him that his dreams of being an astronaut were impossible, he’d been fighting. Because of a random coding error in his genes, he was looking at ten, maybe fifteen years of peak physical condition until his body began to fail on him. Until he was grounded. Permanently. 

He’d taken it like he’d taken every other setback in his then very short life, in the way that had started to worry his parents, and told them that maybe their son wasn’t the carefree child he seemed to be—with silent, calm denial. 

His initial aptitude scores weren’t good enough to get him enrolled in a fast-track course to the Galaxy Garrison? He simply cut out all distraction until his scores were better than anyone had ever seen. He was already a year behind his peers? He trained harder, studied smarter, bent himself to each task set by his instructors and annihilated every record and metric previously set for wannabe space explorers. And then he crushed those records again, and again, until people started to talk about him as some kind of prodigy, Shiro the Hero. 

Friends over the years had never understood it. He was so nice, so easy-going. Why did he continue to kill himself over and over again, push his mind and body into the closest semblance of perfection he could humanly achieve? He was already better than everyone else. He’d already _won_ in their eyes, never mind that he was never competing against anyone but himself. Against a self he never really could be, because of a cruel trick of random evolutionary bias. 

Most of them didn’t understand that he could see the end coming, always. He could feel his muscles withering away like dying plants every time he lay down to sleep. Feel his mind slipping into the complacency of degeneration, surrendering to the bone-deep entropy pulsing in his DNA. 

Everybody died. Everybody wasted away. He wasn’t special. Shiro just had a headstart on the rest of the world. 

The only headstart he’d ever received, and never asked for. 

“You’ve got your head in the clouds,” his baachan would tease him, pinching his cheek when he got distracted as he helped her clean up after dinner when he was younger, and still made time to visit his extended family back in Kyoto, “take care you keep your feet on the ground, Takashi-kun, or you’ll get swept away by an errant breeze.” 

Sometimes, he wondered if he should have listened to his grandmother back then. If he might have found something nice on Earth. Something comfortable and safe. Something happy. Something simple. 

Something he might have one day come to accept as the life he was supposed to have lived. A life continuously killing his urge to fly. 

But then all his close family members had died one by one, and he'd been left with nothing but the Garrison, and his career. Nothing but the stars at night to keep him company. Even after everything he’d been through in the past few years, all the pain and horror, all the agony, all the trauma, he didn’t know if he ever would have been able to settle for such a life. 

It wasn’t a comforting thought, not at all. But it was grounding. It was honest. The tragic irony of the man he was, and had always been, meant that he would never settle for less than the stars themselves. 

Maybe that was why he’d come back from beyond the edge of death. Because even amongst the endless stars, in the infinite consciousness of a being, a force, so much greater and more beautiful than anything he could even begin to comprehend, the voice in the back of his mind whispered, _What if there’s more?_ The voice which heard another, one he loved and trusted, and followed it home like a light through the dark.

Everybody died. Only Shiro was stubborn enough not to accept his own death when it finally caught up to him. 

In the days after waking up in a body which had been made for another version of himself, he’d wondered if he hadn’t finally done more than he was capable of. The happy, tearful faces of his friends and comrades, the comforting touches, the lingering embraces, it was all…overwhelmingly violent and wonderful. It was almost too much. He took care to keep his expression as clear as he could as he acquainted himself again with the people he cared about most in the entire universe, and who now seemed like strangers to his new eyes. Who touched this body which didn’t belong to him, who hovered, watching, waiting for him to crack.

For nearly a week after he’d woken up, he’d spent every waking hour, as few as he’d managed, reminding himself how to breathe, how to walk, how to bend and grasp and cough and smile. How to talk like he wasn’t a ghost who’d been brought back to visceral life. Some part of him nearly broke with the irony that this was probably what he would have had to go through, eventually, had the disease been able to have its way with him. It would have turned his body against him eventually. Made it hard to be the person he’d become in his mad dash to outrun nature. The Galra had cured him, only to mass produce him, and he couldn’t even be too angry about it, really, because this body was frustratingly superior in almost every way. Sure, he was down an arm, but when you got used to floating around in the vast nothingness of a sentient lion robot, you didn’t necessarily mind if you came back missing a few parts. 

He was stronger, faster, and when he finally began to feel somewhat normal again, he was sharper too. His mind raced like it had before he’d learned to focus himself as a teenager, before he’d managed to wrangle the manic yearning in his head and hone it, control it, _use_ it. 

But as he relearned how to _be_ again, after not-being for so long, what felt like an eternity, really, he came back again and again to the same conclusion. 

The body wasn’t his. He was just borrowing it.

Shiro felt where he didn’t align, like the outline of his soul was just slightly too big for the sleeve it was trying to fill. Like he’d grown beyond himself, and he was trying to make himself smaller, sleeker, but he just couldn’t forget what he’d been and what he would be one day soon. It was just a matter of time before the universe balanced its scales. Time—given and borrowed, stolen and lost. Time was the ultimate currency of the cosmos, and he’d always felt like a thief, cheating and scheming and longing for more. 

That was the real kicker. Though Shiro had been given more time, he still felt like it was slipping through his fingers. It’d been nearly two months since he’d awoken to tear-rimmed, violet eyes in a beloved face he’d never really thought he would see again, and yet he was still surprised by how fast time was moving around him. He felt like he was standing in a tunnel, watching bright, spectral flashes of color move around him, desperately trying to remember how he could help, how he could fit himself back into this family he missed like a hole in his own chest. Like a lost limb. 

It helped when he gave himself projects. Small tasks he could manage, bend his mind to for a day or two to feel like he was at least some use. Organizing the food stores in the Yellow Lion. Calculating the fuel usage. Scanning the constant subatomic waves they kept broadcasting for any signs of a friendly hail or signal that they weren’t flying toward something worse than even they could imagine. 

The last Pidge could have done herself, or built a program to do it, but the moment she’d seen Shiro’s expression, before he’d gotten better at pretending to feel normal, she’d relinquished the duty. His emotions were a strange, volatile pack of wildcats, so he’d tried not to thank her too profusely and settled for a quick hug and a series of pats on her head before he’d bent himself to the task. It had been nice. It had helped. Simple calculus to stave off the yawning pit in the back of his mind. If only his sixteen-year-old self could see him now. Doing math to avoid his problems. He could practically hear Matt’s voice echoing through the universe with a long, happy, _NERD_.

It was easier to pretend to be normal when he stopped getting vertigo every time he stood up. When he could walk somewhere without needing to make sure he hadn’t left his body behind him by accident. When he felt the burn and ache in limbs which might not belong to him, but hurt enough for him to lie to himself, for a while. It was easier, so much easier, to forget how wrong it all was when he had something familiar to latch onto. Pain was a constant, a point around which he could orient himself. When the pain lessened, and he began to learn how to move and use this body which was not his, and yet felt like it should be, it was almost worse. 

It also helped that he was spending most of his time with Pidge, and she was the kind of person who radiated an aloof, low-impact interaction, like a low-frequency calming signal which helped him drown out the static. Shiro could sit with her, and talk if he felt like it, or not, as was more often the case. She never pressed him. She never felt the need to comfort him or check in with him. There was an easy confidence in the value of silence he had come to love about Pidge, one that her brother had never quite understood, as much as Shiro missed Matt. 

Only once had Pidge broken this unspoken agreement that neither of them would mention the clone-shaped elephant in the room. One week into their long journey home, the silence had grown pointed. Shiro, who was still having trouble staying awake for more than a few hours at a time, had been surprised to notice it at all. Simple things like the atmosphere and mood of a room had taken him a while to remember, and it had been the first time since being newly-bodied that he’d been able to sense the shift in the Green Lion’s cockpit. 

Or maybe that was leftover from living inside Voltron’s consciousness. Maybe it was him sensing the Green Lion, who was actually sensing Pidge. Maybe he was starting to inhabit a new kind of awareness all together—

_Stop. Focus. Breathe._

Frustration had flickered distractingly in the back of his mind. He knew he had to be patient with himself, that no amount of dumb perseverance and grit would get him through this. At that point, he hadn’t even been sure that he _would_ get through it, but he’d been trying. Damn it all, he’d been trying.

Pidge had folded her legs up under her small body, drumming anxiously on the armrest of her seat. 

Shiro had watched her, oddly touched by the slight, nervous twitching in her expression on a face that looked older than it should have, and yet…perfectly normal. Two disparate images laid one upon the other. Just varied enough for him to know there was something different, that there was something wrong with the way he was viewing the world.

“I know you don’t want to talk about it, probably,” she’d started, voice cracking, “but I just… I wanted to tell you that I’m really glad you’re okay, Shiro.”

It had taken him a moment to swallow the knot rising in his throat. “Thanks, Pidge. Me too.”

She’d nodded, and slowly turned to face him where he’d taken a seat in the right side of her cockpit. Fiddling with her glasses and keeping her gaze down, she’d asked, softly, “Were you able to see all of us, or was it just Keith?”

Shiro’s chest had tightened with a pleasantly familiar sensation at the name, one he’d gotten used to a long time ago. That, at least, hadn’t changed. 

“Sometimes,” he’d said after a moment. “When you formed Voltron, I could see all of you as clearly as if I were with you in your lions. I could feel you. It was amazing, watching you all fight. You know when we formed Voltron the first time, and we felt that intense connection and bond, like you could reach out and touch everyone else’s minds? It was like that. Sort of. I…can’t really describe it.”

Like watching the sped-up birth and death of a star, the phenomenal clash of two realities into one with every swing of Voltron’s sword or blast of its gun. He’d felt them all in every fiber of his being, felt their adrenaline and fear, their synergy, their minds working as one. He’d felt the quintessence of the universe move through them, seen them in the beating heart of everything.

Of course, he’d also felt all the friction and loss which came from rearranging once Keith had left and… Well. 

There was a reason why he’d begun to fade. Why he’d reached out to Lance in a last-ditch attempt to warn them, to help them. To help himself before he disappeared completely. 

Without Keith, without an actual connection to the Black Lion not hampered by a clone, he’d begun to drift. And that thought had haunted him ever since he woke up. Because he thought he’d known what he felt, what he wanted, but now everything was wrapped up in that moment when he’d seen Keith in the Black Lion’s consciousness, bruised, scarred, angry and scared, and he’d felt _alive_ for the first time since he’d died. 

Pidge had slowly looked up at him, and Shiro had frozen at the rim of silver welling behind her glasses. “I thought you were gone.” Her voice had been choked, and he’d been reminded, viscerally, of how young she actually was. He still forgot sometimes, with how intelligent and how capable she was, that she was also only sixteen. “It felt like I was losing my family all over again.”

And in that moment of visceral remembrance, he’d forgotten that this body didn’t belong to him, that he was living on borrowed time. He’d seen a friend crying, and it had all faded to the background. He’d remembered who he was supposed to be. 

He’d held her as she finished crying, as she’d mumbled something about needing to get back to her calculations, and he’d let her go with a fond smile and a feeling in his chest that made it easy to ignore the fact that all of this was still too unreal to believe. 

As the weeks went on and that ease grew with the others too, he wondered… 

What now?

Voltron was stronger than ever. He could feel it in and around the paladins, even without enough energy to form. Whatever he’d brought back with him from the Black Lion’s consciousness, he could sense…something. Like there was a word sitting on the tip of his tongue, and he couldn’t quite bring it to bear. He could see it taking shape around them all like threads of light. It was new, and it was inspiring, and he had no place it in. 

It was fine, right now, for him to be a bit aimless. To step in when needed, to help where he could. To rest. To recover. If that was even a possibility. Allura thought it was, and as she was the resident expert on quintessence, he would defer to her judgement. 

Even if there was that elusive piece of him that remained absent, that essential thing he still felt like he was missing. He might have brought something back with him when he decided to live again, but he’d also left something behind. 

He pushed himself and his new body as far as he could, and still there was something lacking, beyond the missing arm—which was more like a relief, truly, than any real loss. Yes, he felt like a sack of useless meat most of the time, and when fighting broke out, he had to bite back his frustration and self-loathing as he watched his friends and knew there was nothing he could do to protect or help them. 

It was those moments when he felt the most uneasy in this manufactured shell. When he couldn’t seem to remember how to fight, and how to defend. It wasn’t that this body hadn’t known how to fight, far from it. As the memories began to flood back to him in flashes, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this body knew how to fight. In some ways, it was the only thing it knew how to do. It seemed to have been built specifically to fight, and now that he could look back with some hindsight, he saw all the little tweaks Haggar had given to him that no one else would notice. All with the aim of building herself a weapon. 

But it was getting better. _He_ was getting better. 

It simply wasn’t happening fast enough. For a man who had been racing against time his whole life, Shiro now found himself at its mercy. And he hated it. 

The fight in the ruins of the Blade of Marmora’s last stand brought this insufficiency, this weakness, into full and horrible relief.

Shiro was forced to watch as a druid, one of the monsters who had picked him apart and pieced him back together with steel and pain, toyed with Keith. Frozen, literally, because he’d been too slow to realize what was happening. Too distracted to see the threat right in front of his face. Even when Allura had broken them out, he’d been forced to watch from the sidelines as the paladins fought without him.

He wasn’t a jealous man, not really. He’d never been one to want something he didn’t have, even in his darker moments when he raged against his breaking body and wished there were some way he could fix it. He’d always been ambitious, driven, motivated by a desire to do anything and everything he could before the chance was gone, but he’d never felt envy before. And he wasn’t even sure that’s what he actually felt, other than a desire to protect his friends. It was a gut-deep instinct to want to join them, to fight beside them, to step in front of them and take the blade or the shot himself. This body knew _that_ , at least. It’d protected them countless times. It had fought with them, before it had fought against them, and even then it had been against the clone’s will, against _Shiro’s_ , will. This body was built to fight, so the fault couldn’t lay with the body. 

Maybe the fault lay with him, and whatever he was, now. Not a paladin of Voltron. Not a champion of the Galra. Not even a pilot of the Galaxy Garrison. 

He shoved it all down, forced himself to at least pretend that he was under control, as he watched Keith say goodbye to his mother. He wanted to go to him, to help him through it. This, too, was an instinct, an urge that went beyond conscious desire, but even that was misguided now. Keith didn’t need him. He certainly felt some hesitance toward him, no matter what he’d told Shiro. 

Maybe it was that extra sense Shiro had now, some higher awareness of the dynamics of energy, but something was different between them. 

The rational part of him accepted that things would never be the same, nor did he expect them to be. How could they be? He’d tried to _kill_ Keith. People didn’t just come back from that. Even they didn’t. He’d broken something fundamental between them, and there was no putting it back together with bloody hands and bruised hearts. It was right for Keith to hold him at a distance. It made sense.

The irrational part of him, however, hated it. Just like he hated everything which no longer fit in this new, old life of his. This new body. His old, ragged soul. The tattered threads of the relationship he’d once had with Keith and the other paladins. 

He would never forgive himself for what he’d done to them. He’d spend the rest of his life trying to make up for it, and if he couldn’t help them fight, if he couldn’t protect them—if he couldn’t be of some _use_ , he couldn’t even do that much. 

The walk back to the lions was a silent one, all of them recovering from the shock of the fight, the reality that they were one member down, and the loss felt more potent with every step. With every new revelation and loss, this journey home was taking its toll. 

Keith walked at the front, Shiro right behind him, fighting the urge to put a hand on his shoulder. He was taking it…well. Better than Shiro might have thought he would. But that, too, was different. _Keith_ was different now. He didn’t need someone else to give him permission to feel grief, or pain. He’d found something with his mother that he’d been missing. Some kind of inner calm. 

It touched that place inside Shiro which still marveled at the sheer wonder that was Keith Kogane, pride mixed with affection mixed with a deep-seated sense of awe.

He’d seen the beginnings of greatness around Keith from the moment they met, that initial draw which had morphed slowly into something more complicated and deeper than mere admiration. It was humbling to know Keith was finally wearing it for the rest of the world to see. 

Shiro just wished he’d been there when it happened. 

“How far until the next planet, Pidge?” Keith asked, voice showing no sign of grief beyond the tightness of his eyes. “I figure we need to let the lions recharge before we head back into darkspace.”

“Yeah,” Pidge murmured, bringing up her scanner. “I’ve got a few dwarf planets in orbit around the wreckage of a binary star system three days out. We can park it for a day and then get back on track.”

Keith nodded. “Let’s head out then.” 

Lance and Hunk tried to maintain a weak thread of conversation, cutting the silence of this desolate planet. Still, it was an empty place, a haunted place, and Shiro wouldn’t be sorry to see the last of it. 

Everyone broke off for their respective lions, Shiro heading behind Pidge, when Keith caught his arm in a gentle grip. 

Shiro froze, brow lifting in surprise. He didn’t think he would ever get used to how easily Keith touched him these days. “Keith?”

He released Shiro, turned away from him to hide his face. It only served to show Shiro the scar across his cheek, fully healed now, but still a horrible reminder of everything Shiro had failed to be when Keith needed him most. “Would you mind flying with me for a while? I…don’t really wanna be alone right now.”

Something in Shiro’s brain shuddered to a halt, and he was dimly aware of the rest of the group watching them. “Of course,” he managed. 

“If you take Shiro,” Pidge called from the mouth of the Green Lion, “I want the dog.”

Keith’s mouth twitched. “That’s fair.”

Shiro frowned. “I feel like I’ve just been insulted for some reason.”

“Kosmo is a lot fluffier than you, Shiro,” Pidge said with a smile as the wolf materialized next to her. “You should work on that. Might make you a better copilot.”

“His name’s not Kosmo,” Keith muttered. 

“You think we could find a space ferret before we head back to Earth?” Lance mused, leaning against Red’s foot. “I’ve always wanted one of those.”

“What about the mice?” Allura called, rotating her shoulders with a wince. She was still feeling the effects of whatever magic she’d called on to fight the druid’s device, apparently. “You’ll make them jealous.”

“I’ve asked the mice to ride with me, but they only like riding with you and Hunk.” Lance pouted. “I’m just saying that I’d like a cosmic pet too. I get lonely.”

“You have Kaltenecker,” Hunk replied as he made his way into Yellow’s mouth, something tired in the tilt of his broad shoulders. 

“And I love her very, very much, but I can’t keep her in Red’s cockpit anymore. She gets space-sick and I’m not going to risk having another biohazard incident in the middle of darkspace.”

“ _I’ll_ ride with you, Lance,” Romelle said dismissively, “if you’re going to put up such a fuss about it.”

Lance looked like he was trying his best not to grimace as she walked past him into Red’s mouth. “Oh, thanks, Romelle, but maybe this time you could not backseat fly the whole way, as I have a bit more experience than you—”

“If we’re all done coordinating the seating arrangements,” Keith called, “I’d like to leave before next year.”

Shiro grinned as Lance bemoaned, loudly, the fact that Keith had been the one to initiate the swap in the first place. His smile died, however, as he looked up into the Black Lion’s face, feeling again that strange disconnect between what this body knew, and what he knew in his heart. Part of him still felt like it should be him walking into the cockpit of his own lion, but it was a vestigial want, one he didn’t truly feel connected to anymore. It had been a kind of home to him, once, a calling, but now it was simply another piece of a life where he no longer fit. 

He felt Keith’s gaze on him as they walked into Black’s mouth. He tried to smile. “You were amazing back there. I had no idea you and the wolf were so connected.”

Keith’s expression softened. “Neither did I, honestly.” 

Shiro couldn’t help but marvel at the fact that old Keith, the Keith he’d grown accustomed to, would have frowned at the compliment and tried to dodge it. He would have given a shrug and muttered something under his breath about how it wasn’t a big deal. 

This new Keith was more gracious, more confident. Sure, he was older, and Shiro was still having a hard time not noticing how the difference only made him more handsome, like all the frantic lines of his person had been sharpened and honed into something steady, and sure. And that was its own hurdle to jump over, but Shiro was managing. Sort of. Barely.

Shiro only realized that he was still staring when Keith looked away, faint color high on his cheeks. He cleared his throat, trying to think of something to say, but he came up blank. 

This was one thing he couldn’t seem to remember. He’d had a lot of practice hiding his interest in Keith, burying it behind something safe so he didn’t scare Keith away. So that their friendship wouldn’t be tarnished by something Keith clearly had no desire for, and if he were being honest, Shiro didn’t know if he felt up to, ill-fitting and broken as he was. 

But this new body had never gotten used to loving Keith from a respectful distance. This new body didn’t know how to handle a Keith who was taller and calmer and more beautiful than anything Shiro could remember looking at in a long, long time, a Keith who looked like the final form of his Marmoran blade, extended, lethal, confident. Keith had always been a knife upon which Shiro had gladly cut his heart. He didn’t know how to manage Keith as a sword. 

He settled into the Black Lion’s cockpit, trying to rid himself of that nagging feeling that he had too much energy and nowhere to direct it. It was worse in Black than the other lions. Worse, and better. He never felt closer to the man he used to be than when he was sitting inside Black. 

“You don’t have to fly with me if you don’t want to,” Keith said, drawing Shiro’s attention where he was pulling off his helmet on the other side of the cockpit. Keith’s back was to him, and he was subjected to the full, lovely tumble of Keith’s overlong hair. 

Not for the first time, Shiro wondered how he managed to make it look so good out in the middle of nowhere space, when he knew for a fact that the only person who used hair product in Voltron was Lance. 

“It’s not you,” Shiro murmured, pulling off his own helmet. “It’s me.”

Keith turned and gave him an oddly sharp look, before Shiro realized what he’d said. 

“No, I meant,” Shiro cleared his throat, “it’s weird being in Black without being… _in_ her.” He groaned and scrubbed his hand over his face. “I’m going to stop talking now.”

Keith’s small, rough laugh made his stomach do a feeble flip. God, even his voice was different, and completely, wonderfully the same. 

“I think I get it.” Keith slid into the pilot’s seat with grace, Black responding to his touch at once. She practically purred. Shiro could empathize with the sentiment. “I know it must be weird for you.”

“Not as weird as you might think.” Shiro sat down as Keith flew them up into the planet’s atmosphere, flying so smooth and straight Shiro had to marvel at his mastery. He really had been born to fly. “I always knew this was how it was going to play out.”

“You knew you were going to die and get transported to the Black Lion’s inner quintessence while your clone masqueraded as you for six months before Haggar made it go homicidal?”

“Yeah, that’s how I figured it would go. You messed it up by spending two years on a space whale, but everything else was pretty much to plan.”

Keith nodded, the side of his mouth pulling into a smile. 

They lapsed into easy silence for a few hours, checking in with the others now and then to make sure they were all on the same heading. Shiro watched space fly by them, letting himself be lulled into the drifts of stars, the spray of distant nebulae. They passed comets trailing fire, a kind of ice which burned red, a colony of small, wide-finned creatures sailing in the orbit of a newly formed star. 

Shiro had started to zone out, his thoughts lengthening and stretching into the longer wavelengths he’d fallen into when he was floating weightless in everything, when he felt the Black Lion twitch and jump forward. He looked sideways, only to see a light in Keith’s eyes as he stared forward. An asteroid field spread before them, chunks of glittering black diamond winking in and out of existence as they got closer, catching the light of a nearby galaxy. 

“You know what that reminds me of?” Keith said, his voice casual even as he leaned forward, long, graceful hands clenching slightly around his controls. 

Shiro caught his meaning at once, unable to curb his smile. “I think it’s a bit different than the test sim, Keith.”

Keith hummed, shooting him a sly glance out the corner of his eye. “Maybe.”

“I don’t know how Black would take to being crashed into an asteroid just because you feel like showing off.”

“Who says I’m gonna crash?”

Shiro schooled his expression into casual consideration, but inside, something stirred. The same fire which Keith had fanned in him a few days ago when they ran together. The same fire he’d always felt when he looked into those dark violet eyes and felt the urge to fly off the edge of a cliff. 

Keith clicked on the comms casually. “Hey Lance?”

_“What’s up, boss?”_

“Can you start a timer for me?”

_“Uh, sure. For what?”_

Shiro snorted, part of him wanting to cross his arms, though the effect was slightly lessened when he could only hold one arm over his chest. Instead, he leaned forward, placed his hand on the back of Keith’s chair as he judged the distance from this side of the asteroid field to the other end. “Fifteen minutes.” It was five minutes shorter than he would have expected to make it through himself, but Keith had always been the better pilot. “No less. No way.”

Keith turned to look at him, expression sliding into one of pure, beautiful confidence. An expression which made all the disparate, shaky parts of Shiro come together in one great flash of heat. “Hold onto something, old-timer. Lance— _now._ ”

Shiro only had a second to brace himself before Keith kicked the Black Lion into a sprint. She bounded forward, spinning with an eager growl as she dove into the asteroid field, Shiro’s stomach bottoming out and flipping with that same adrenaline spike he’d come to love, to crave with his whole, fractured heart. Voices came on over the comms, some indignant, some exasperated, but they both ignored them. 

Keith was too busy flying like his life depended on it, like it was as easy as breathing. Like there was nothing between him and the lion and the winking black embrace of the void, weaving in and out of the asteroids like he wasn’t flying faster than anything should ever be able to fly. Like this wasn’t breaking some fundamental rule of the universe and then lighting the rulebook on fire. 

Shiro was too busy watching Keith. 

There had always been a freedom to Keith, an untamed, unshaped quality which had drawn laced-up, finely controlled Shiro like a moth to a flame. A wild, untethered thirst for the world which he’d loved, even before he knew he was _in_ love.

Watching Keith fly, feeling his hunger and exhilaration through the humming energy of the lion beneath them both through that strange, extrasensory connection he now had to this man and this machine, Shiro might have fallen in love with him all over again if he hadn’t already hit the bottom of that particular hole.

He looked like a being from another reality—thin lips stretched back to reveal a smile that was more grit than pleasure, violet eyes wide and intent shining with starlight, black hair limned in an amethyst glow. His long body was taut like the pulled string of a bow, an arrow shooting through the universe. He was beautiful. He was everything. A flash of lightning across a storm-darkened sky.

Shiro lost track of time as Keith put the Black Lion through her paces, as he pushed her to heights even Shiro didn’t know she was capable of. He just watched, unconscious laughter spilling from his lips while Keith grinned and kept his eyes forward. Any fear he might have felt at the speed and the lack of control was a feeble thing he acknowledged only because fear was good, and fear reminded him to survive, but he trusted Keith. He trusted this. Even when he couldn’t trust himself. 

Keith shot out of the other side of the field with no more celebration than a small, satisfied grunt. Shiro let himself lean over the pilot’s chair, laughing as he caught his breath. 

“How long, Lance?” Keith asked, voice sounding rather smooth for someone who’d just broken the laws of reality. 

_“Thirteen minutes, forty-three seconds. Also_ fuck _you that was amazing, you ass—”_

Keith muted Lance before he could finish, looking even more smugly satisfied with himself.

He hadn’t even teleported. _The little shit_ , Shiro thought with another laugh. Adrenaline buzzing through his body, he felt lighter than he had in a long time. Like his body had been filled with helium and he was floating, but not disconnected. He could feel everything. The lion, Keith, and the space beyond. 

Keith turned and smirked up at him. 

Shiro took a step back as he rolled his eyes and grabbed the nearest thing he could find, the broken butt of a rifle which looked like it had been used as the wolf’s chew toy, and lobbed it at Keith’s head. 

Keith caught it, flipping it around a few times in his hands before his smile softened and he let out a real, unguarded laugh. 

And just like that, Shiro felt like all the bones in his body had dissolved into motes of stardust. Keith still had that power, to stop him in his tracks, to flip the world like a coin. One minute, he was smug and smirking, the next, every piece of affected charm faded to something so pure at his core, it still shocked Shiro. For someone who’d worn his attitude like another layer of armor almost all the time they’d known each other, Keith with his guard down was damn near transcendent. 

He stared at Keith, at the beautiful smile tugging up his lips, at the light in his eyes, at the scar marring his cheek, and Shiro wondered if all that pain and trauma he had gone through was worth it to see Keith like this. 

The moment stretched, suspended in the Black Lion’s cockpit. Shiro felt an echo of the connection they’d shared in her consciousness, the distance between them shrinking as Keith pulled across the star-strewn void. A tether at the base of his spine, an answer in the violet eyes looking back at him. 

Violet. He should have realized the moment the Black Lion chose him that this was where they would all end. 

Shiro waited for Keith to look away, for the moment to break, as so many had broken before, but—he didn’t. He kept staring, and Shiro kept looking, and that awareness rose up around him like static electricity. That word hanging on the tip of his tongue. 

A line appeared in Keith’s brow. Shiro straightened, opened his mouth. 

Allura’s voice came through the comms, _“Are you done joyriding, or are we going to make a habit of running down our energy on a whim?”_

Shiro’s mind slipped out of place, and just like that he was thrown back to the mundanity of his ill-fitting body. He cleared his throat. “Sorry, everyone. I goaded Keith into it.”

Keith kept watching him, a pensive look on his face, like he was searching for something. 

_“Shiro, I’m disappointed in you,”_ Allura answered, though her voice was clear of any real judgement. _“You’re supposed to be the mature one.”_

A snort came through the comms which sounded distinctly like a sixteen-year-old girl trying hard not to be subtle. 

“Something to add, Pidge?” Keith asked, frowning as he finally turned away. 

Shiro sagged without the weight of Keith’s attention. 

_“Of course not, Keith. What could I possibly have to add to this conversation about you peacocking all over space after Shiro dared you to do something stupid?”_

Color bloomed high over Keith’s cheeks in the immediate silence. Shiro frowned at it. Keith had never really been bothered by the team’s teasing before. 

Hunk let out a strangled laugh before Lance mused, _“You know, Pidge, I think you’re onto something_ —”

Shiro leaned forward and said, firmly, “Check in at the top of the hour for another simulation drill.” A wave of protests built before he muted the channel. “They’re just giving you a hard time because they respect you, you know.”

Keith gave him a sharp look out of the corner of his eye. “I…sure. I don’t really care what they do. They’re going to be obnoxious anyway.”

“I’m serious. You’re a great leader, Keith. They all see that.”

Keith looked unconvinced, when a message popped up on their screen, written solely in emojis. Shiro just stared at it, barely processing the obscene amount of what looked like…eggplants, when Keith cleared the message. 

Jaw locked, eyes staring forward, he muttered, “Respect. Sure.”

Shiro just smiled as Keith flew the Black Lion back into formation with the others. 

 

— ✩ —

 

The next few days went about as smoothly as any of them could hope for. Hunk got lost in the rings of a gas giant and Coran was nearly jettisoned out into space when he refused to stop singing the Altean Alphabet song and Romelle was in a bad mood, but they reached a suitable landing spot on a dwarf planet Pidge had marked as a good rest stop. It had no atmosphere, so there was no chance for any fresh air, but they made do by bunking down in the Black Lion’s hangar. After a few hours, Lance started to get antsy, and asked Keith to spar with him. 

Shiro was surprised by how readily Keith agreed, something like anticipation in his eyes as he watched them circle each other. Lance had grown into himself and his own confidence over the last year, so Shiro thought it was a pretty stupid choice to inflict Keith on his understandably worse skill at fighting, a Keith who now had even more years on him than he’d had before, a Keith who’d been trained as an assassin by the universe’s deadliest warriors—but he kept his mouth shut. If Lance wanted to have his ass handed to him in front of everyone else, Shiro wasn’t going to stop him. 

Hunk, Pidge, and Romelle set up something of a fighting ring around the mat while Coran insisted on commentating. Lance stretched out in a series of increasingly flamboyant and ineffective poses which probably did more to hinder his body than ready it, while Keith just watched, a small, deadly smile playing at the edge of his lips. 

The first round ended in about five seconds when Keith flipped Lance over his knee like a sack of rice. 

“This can’t be a good idea,” Allura murmured beside Shiro where they’d sat a bit back from the others, not wanting to join in with the insults and jeers being thrown by Romelle and Pidge. “He knows this isn’t a good idea. Doesn’t he?”

Shiro grimaced as he watched Lance telegraph a hit which might have worked, had his opponent not been Keith. “Lance has always been…motivated. Maybe it will be good for him. Keith’s a brilliant fighter. He might learn a thing or two.”

They both winced as Lance landed again on the mat, heaving for breath as Keith looked on, unimpressed. 

“You have to admire his tenacity, I suppose.”

Shiro looked at her, surprised by the softness of her voice, the smile hovering over her lips. “He certainly doesn’t lack for nerve.”

Allura smiled in full as Lance pushed himself back to his feet and blew a kiss at Keith. “No. He certainly doesn’t.”

Was that affection in the princess’s eyes, or just fondness? It was the worst kept secret in the team that Lance was madly in love with her, but Shiro had never thought the feelings might be reciprocated. The look on her face, though… It hit home in a way Shiro was intimately familiar with. 

Allura noticed him staring, and her eyes flicked down self-consciously. “Shiro,” she started, her voice growing stilted, forced. “I’ve been hoping to speak to you about something, actually.”

Shiro’s brow lifted as, in the background, Lance gave a loud yelp and hit the mat again. He’d managed to stay up longer this time. Good for him. “What is it, Allura?”

She shifted from foot to foot, pushing her loose hair back over her shoulder. Uncertainty didn’t sit easily on her features. “I… I realize this is somewhat trivial, in the grand scheme of things, but I was hoping to ask for your advice. About something rather, ah, delicate.”

Shiro blinked, unease filtering into the pit of his stomach as he had the distinct impression that he knew where this conversation was going, just as he also knew that he was about the last person in the whole universe who might be able to help her if he was right. “Of course. If I can.”

She smiled and bit her lip as she cast a glance in the direction of the fighting ring, where Keith was scowling as Lance tried to cartwheel into him in what Shiro assumed was some kind of a springing kick. Curling a hand around his arm, she guided him away from the others, into a corner which wasn’t secluded, exactly, just separate from everyone else. 

It gave Shiro some time to study her, to see the hardness in her face now which hadn’t been there a few months ago, the distant steel which had always lingered under the fine features and dignity of her station, but was now more apparent than the diplomatic veneer she so often tried to project. She looked tired. More than she should. It wasn’t like any of them were getting much rest these days, even with the endless flying through empty space, but he guessed it was because of something else. He couldn’t imagine what she must be feeling, with the news that the Altean Colony had disappeared, and with everything that had happened between her and Lotor… Shiro might have been elsewhere for most of that final interaction, but he knew enough to assume that it wasn’t just nerves which had given her a haunted, hardened cast to her face. 

Allura settled on a crate at the far edge of the hangar bay, petting Kaltenecker gingerly as the cow chewed through a mouthful of hay. Shiro leaned next to her, giving her time, waiting. 

“I was wondering…” She took a deep breath. “This might be over the line, but I know you were involved with someone before you left Earth on that fateful mission which brought you to the Galra.”

Shiro tried to control his expression. So he was right in theory, but wildly off in her approach of attack. “Ah, I… Not _right_ before. We were—” He cleared his throat. “We’d been done for a while before that.”

He hadn’t thought about Adam in months. What did that say about him that the only adult relationship he’d ever been in had ended so quietly that he hadn’t thought about the man he was supposed to have been in love with only two years ago? 

“Oh dear, I only meant…” Allura’s shoulders drooped. “I’ve really stepped in it, haven’t I? I only meant to confirm that you have some experience in matters of the heart.”

Shiro scratched the back of his neck, trying to ignore the sounds of the fight going on behind him. “Only in the strictest sense, really.” He had experience in ignoring matters of the heart, definitely, but otherwise… 

Allura looked at him, her blue eyes piercing. “I wouldn’t have come to you, only—I’m not sure any of the others would be better situated to help with this kind of thing.”

Shiro let out a shaky laugh. “I’m pretty sure Lance is—ah,” he broke off at her pained expression, “well, maybe besides him, I’m… I really don’t think I’m your guy, Allura—”

As he scrambled for a way out of this conversation, he realized that he might truly be her only other option. As far as he knew, Keith had never been romantically inclined toward anything except knives, flying, and bad documentaries about aliens. Neither had Pidge, unless you were a sentient robot. Hunk might be a bit more emotionally fluent than the others, though Shiro couldn’t stand by that with any confidence, because he made a habit of not inserting himself in anyone else’s personal affairs. Romelle was a wild card. He didn’t know what to make of her on a good day, he only knew that he was happy to have her on his side. 

“You don’t think Coran might—”

“No,” Allura said, emphatically, “absolutely not. Coran is like a second father to me, and while he’s brilliant and wonderful and I adore him, I would not under any circumstances ask him to help me untangle my feelings for—this.” Her eyes got wide and she looked at him with a pitiful kind of entreaty. “Shiro, please. I don’t have anyone else to turn to.”

He did not say that he felt bad for her if he was the only person she could go to for romantic advice. Instead, he took a deep breath, and nodded. “Okay. I’m guessing this has to do with Lance?”

Her cheeks darkened in a blush. “I’m afraid so.”

“Right. Well. He’s a great guy?”

She shot him a sideways look. “Of course he is. That’s… I’m not questioning my taste. I might have before, but…” She trailed off and looked behind Shiro, where Keith was walking Lance through a series of defensive stances which might help him stay on his feet for more than ten seconds. Again, her eyes softened. “Lance is a wonderful man. Anyone would be lucky to be the source of his affections.”

Shiro couldn’t help his own smile. “I’m not really sure I see why you need my advice, princess.”

She swatted him playfully, which for her was a bit harder than she probably intended. “Stop that. I…I suppose I’m unsure as to whether or not it’s a good idea to…move forward with anything. It’s not exactly a simple situation we’re in, is it? I find myself questioning whether it would be worth jeopardizing our friendship for something more.” She turned to him, shaking her head. “Your previous partner—”

“Adam,” he supplied when she paused. Speaking his name out loud only caused a slight lurch somewhere in the back of Shiro’s mind, where he held all of the guilt and blame he still felt for how he’d left things. 

“Were you and Adam friends before you entered into a romantic relationship?”

“Yes,” he said slowly. “We were in the same flight class.”

“And how did you navigate that transition?”

Shiro sighed, never having felt comfortable with these kinds of conversations. In fact, he usually went out of his way to avoid talking about this very topic. And not just because he’d been harboring a slow-burning love for a man he now knew thought of him only as a brother. He just…was not good at any of this. He never had been. In fact, Matt had told him more than once that it must have been the universe balancing him out to make him so abysmal at… _this_. If Allura needed help ignoring her feelings in favor of never interacting with them, he might be able to help, but this was one area where he always, without deviation, been a complete failure.

She was still watching him, discomfort reflected in her eyes. “He was the one who asked me out,” he said, “or initiated things, I guess. I’d, ah, been attracted to him, before, I guess, but I didn’t know he felt that way until he told me himself. Apparently I’m rather oblivious when it comes to this…stuff.”

Allura pursed her lips, eyes darting over his shoulder before she looked back at him. “Hm. Still. Was there any awkwardness involved with the transition? How did you alleviate it, if so?”

“God, Allura, I don’t know.” Shiro straightened and took a step to try and work out the tension in his spine. “It was weird at first, sure, but… If you’re asking me if it was worth it, then my answer is yes. It’s going to be weird, but if you care about Lance, I think you should go for it.” He sighed. “And even I know that he cares about you.”

She searched his face for a moment, looking rather young in the soft light of the hangar. “You’re probably right. I just want to be sure.” Her voice grew small. “I can’t bear the thought of hurting him.”

Shiro patted her shoulder in what he hoped was a comforting manner, and murmured, “I understand that. More than you know.”

Allura laughed quietly. “I’m sure you do.”

He ignored that comment, and added, “If it helps, I trust you more than maybe anyone in the universe to try. You’re a brilliant, kind woman, Allura. You deserve to be with someone who deserves you.”

She blinked as her eyes grew bright. “Oh, Shiro. Thank you.” She cupped his face with her hand, a soft touch, one full of comfort and reassurance. “I appreciate that. Truly I do. After… Well. After everything that’s happened, I was starting to question whether or not I should be even thinking about this.”

He gave her a smile, and patted her hand. 

“You deserve the same, you know.” Something about her expression grew pointed as she continued to look up at him. “I hope you realize that.”

Shiro tried to keep his smile up, but it was hard to lie under that piercing blue gaze. He couldn’t exactly tell her that he’d resigned himself to a lonely life of watching the man he loved flourish from a distance, content to be just shy of content forever.

Allura smiled, blinking the last tears from her eyes as she leaned up to kiss his cheek. “I think I’m beginning to understand you better, Shiro.”

He frowned as a commotion went off behind him, a series of curses and a loud thump, followed by a smattering of laughter. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Simply that I could not fathom why a man as noble and good and handsome as you hadn’t found himself a partner yet.”

His eyes narrowed as she gave him a knowing smile. “I’m going to take that as a compliment.”

_“I WON!”_

Shiro and Allura looked back at the others just as Lance threw his arms into the air. There were a few dark patches on his arms where bruises were beginning to form, and there was a slightly puffed look to his right cheek, but otherwise, he looked whole. And indeed, Keith was picking himself off the floor, looking flushed and angry. 

“You got in a lucky hit,” he muttered, eyes flicking over to Shiro and Allura. 

“I supplexed your ass, Kogane!” Lance pranced around Keith, arms still in the air, like he was a prizefighter posing for an adoring crowd. “I _owned_ you.”

“Technically,” Pidge said, helpfully, “You’re dead ten times over, but sure. You _owned_ him.”

“Come on, baby, let’s go another round,” Lance said with far too much zeal. “I’ll show you how they do this down in _Cuba_ —”

Keith wasted no time in swiping his foot under Lance’s hopping feet, sending him faceplanting back into the mat. “Lesson’s over.” His eyes flicked over to Shiro again, and though he smiled, there was something pained about the tilt of his mouth as he turned and made his way up into the Black Lion’s cockpit. 

Shiro watched him go, a strange sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach, but was distracted by Lance’s low, gutteral groaning. He knew Keith hadn’t done more than rough him up, but he also knew how Lance could get if someone didn’t acknowledge him, and he didn’t want to deal with Lance’s bruised ego the rest of the day. 

The afternoon stretched on, the hours settling into what would have otherwise been night, if they had a normal sun to track the time. Keith had decided it would be smarter to keep them all sleeping in the same lion, just in case they were attacked. Scattering hadn’t helped them in the past, and this was going to be their last night together for a while. Once they left for darkspace, it might be weeks until they could all be in the same room again. 

Opting to settle around a central space-heater rigged to glow a soft orange in imitation of a fire, Shiro found himself enjoying Coran’s take on a ghost story—a tale of horror which involved something called a tirluvarian garbunkle, which he guessed was an analogue to a boogeyman, impersonating a king of Altea only to steal the nightmares of children and turn them into bad daytime theater. 

Hunk began to nod off at once, nearly crushing Pidge when he toppled over in his sleep. Lance gave a low groan every once in a while to remind them all that he was sore and hurting from his sparring session. Keith hadn’t said much all day, but when it came time to bunk down for the night, he sat down next to Shiro without a word. 

As the conversation grew quiet and people drifted off to sleep, Shiro found himself growing more and more conscious of the space between them, how Keith kept reaching for something on his belt, only to jerkily continue the movement like he was just rotating his arm. He must be missing his knife, and by extension, his mother. Shiro wanted to say something, but he knew Keith wouldn’t appreciate the audience. 

Shiro’s mind kept returning to Allura’s questions, her intimation that romance was something he deserved just as much as anyone else. 

It was an odd idea, and he didn’t know why. It wasn’t that he didn’t want that for himself. Of course he did. He simply hadn’t thought that far ahead. His life had been measured in the amount of time it would take for his body to quit on him. Everything after that had been a dark space, a blank void. Theoretically, romance could wait for him to be done with his career and his ambitions. It could wait until he was ready to settle down. It was why he’d never really thought far enough ahead for any relationship to matter. And in the time since his capture on Kerberos, any desire for romance had taken a rather direct deviation in the form of Keith, which was not something that would ever happen. He loved Keith. He would always love Keith. But Keith thought of him as a brother. And so he’d probably be alone for the rest of his life. If he lived that long.

Before Kerberos, Adam had been the only man he’d ever considered in that nebulous _after_. And even then, it had always felt like a second choice. Something to do only when everything else had been taken away from him. It was what had broken them apart for good, in the end. Adam hadn’t wanted to wait only to come second to Shiro’s own ambition. 

He stared at the radiator, thinking of that night, two weeks before the Kerberos Mission, when he’d come back to his and Adam’s apartment only to find it empty of any trace of the man he’d tried to love, except for a note and an empty ring box. He hadn’t even felt sad, really, just relieved. That it was over. That he didn’t have to feel like a horrible person for not feeling differently, for not wanting Adam more than he wanted the stars.

Shiro hoped Adam had found someone else by now. He hoped he’d become someone’s first choice. He deserved that. 

“You should go with Pidge tomorrow.”

Shiro started, looking to Keith where he was sitting against a crate with his arms folded over his chest, hair falling over his eyes and brushing the edge of his scar. “Okay,” he murmured, trying not to wake everyone else. “Are you sure?”

Keith nodded, jerking his chin toward the wolf where he was curled between Shiro and Pidge, fur ruffled up and breathing slowly. “I’ll take the wolf.”

Shiro tried to read his expression, but it was hard in the dim light. The radiator only glowed faintly, casting just enough light for him to see Keith’s outline. Languid and long, his chin a slash where it rested on his chest. “You’ll be okay on your own?”

Keith shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

Shiro’s first instinct was to press him, to reassure him that he wasn’t alone, that he never needed to be alone ever again. But…

Something was off between them, and the last thing Shiro wanted to do was make Keith uncomfortable. He didn’t need to hover. Keith didn’t need anyone’s protection. Certainly not _his_ , after what he’d done. 

“All right,” Shiro murmured, looking away before Keith could see his unease. “Whatever you want.”

A moment of silence stretched between them, pointed and weighty. 

“So,” Keith said, his tone immediately flagging to Shiro as falsely casual, “you and Allura, huh?”

Shiro blinked, feeling a little as if he’d been dropped into a conversation he didn’t know he was having. “What?”

Keith continued, his voice a bit too loud, “You’re interested in Allura? I saw you guys earlier, and it looked like she likes you. I think that’s great. You should go for it.”

Shiro looked at him, wondering if there wasn’t something off in the wiring of this new brain of his which made it impossible for him to understand what Keith was saying. 

Keith was still turned away, but Shiro saw the tension in his arms, the purposeful pose which now looked not casual at all, but forced. 

“I…” Shiro looked over the rest of the team. All of them seemed to be sleeping, but it would be his luck that someone would wake up and hear this conversation. More than anything, though, he was so taken aback by the fact that _Keith_ , of all people, was bringing this up. If he weren’t desperately in love with the idiot, he might have felt some kind of betrayal. “I’m not sure… Uh.”

Keith just nodded, as if Shiro had confirmed anything rather than just gape at him like a fish. “After Lotor, she deserves someone good, and you’re...great. So that’s great.” In reality, it sounded about as far from great as it could, and even though Shiro could, from time to time, be generously described as oblivious, he could tell that Keith was lying through his teeth. He’d never been a particularly skilled liar. It was one of the things Shiro liked most about him. 

Shiro seemed to find the controls to his brain again, and managed, “Keith, I’m not interested in Allura like that.”

Keith looked at him, eyes big and impossibly dark in the reflection of the radiator, only to look away again. “It’s okay if you are, I mean. Obviously that’s okay.” It wasn’t, clearly. “I get it. Sort of. She’s...nice, I guess. Beautiful. If you like that sort of thing.” 

“Keith,” Shiro said, thinking that blunt honesty was about the only thing which would save him from this conversation, “I’m gay.”

For a moment, there was only silence and the slight sound of Romelle snoring. And then Keith opened his mouth only to shut it again, before he said, “Oh.”

“I’m not attracted to Allura.” Shiro tried not to laugh at the thought. Not that it was that outlandish, it was just so far off base that Shiro couldn’t help but find it hilarious. “She’s just a friend. A good friend, but… No. Not even a little bit.”

“I mean,” Keith said, his voice a bit strangled, “me too.”

Shiro’s mouth tipped into a sideways smile. “You aren’t attracted to Allura either?” He should feel bad about this. It really wasn’t funny. It wasn’t. 

“No. G-ay.” Keith stumbled over the word, like he hadn’t realized it was coming out of his mouth until he heard it himself. “I’m—gay.”

The humor died in Shiro’s chest, leaving behind something fragile, and warm. “Oh,” he breathed. “Keith, that’s… I didn’t know.”

Keith’s head snapped toward him, something skittish in the furrow of his brow, before he muttered, “It’s not like I broadcast it.” He took a breath, seeming to gather himself, and added, low, “So don’t feel bad or anything.”

Shiro held his gaze, caught between something like admiration and pride, and something entirely different which made this all very weird and uncomfortable. _Brother. He thinks you’re his brother. Calm down._ “Is this the first time you’ve told anyone?”

Keith was still staring at him like he was waiting for Shiro to freak out. “Technically?”

“Keith, that’s…” Shiro swallowed his own discomfort and placed his hand on Keith’s shoulder, trying to make the contact reassuring. “Thank you for trusting me. I know how hard this can be, but I want you to know that I’m here, if you need anyone to talk—”

“Thanks,” Keith said sharply, his eyes still hard on Shiro’s face. He shifted just slightly, and Shiro was reminded once again that he was not a little kid picking fights anymore. He was strong, and powerful, and the shoulder under Shiro’s hand flexed distractingly. 

_Brother_. 

“Okay,” Keith added, some of the tension releasing from his body, like he was speaking more to himself. “Okay.”

Shiro smiled, and he couldn’t help the weird electricity which shot through him when Keith’s eyes flashed down to his lips. 

A cough broke the silence, and Shiro had to fight not to clamp down hard on Keith’s shoulder. 

“Hey, Keith?” Pidge asked, loudly. “Can you hand me that holopad over your shoulder? If you guys are going to keep me awake, I might as well run those system diagnostics again.”

Shiro’s hand fell from Keith’s shoulder as he turned to see Pidge staring at them both over the wolf, her smile wide and her glasses glinting with hellfire. Or the radiator’s glow. Both seemed plausible to Shiro at that moment. 

Keith said nothing, reaching behind him and chucking the pad at her face.

She fumbled, but caught it, sitting up and leaning on the wolf. “Also,” she added, again, loudly, “I think this is great. You two talking about your sexuality with such honesty and without inhibition. I’m really touched to be included in this moment.”

A groan sounded from the other side of Keith. “Are you all having a moment without me?” Lance asked, voice slurred with sleep. “That’s rude, and I won’t stand for it.”

“Shiro’s gay,” Pidge supplied in a chipper voice. 

The thought that perhaps it had been a mistake to stop being dead ran through Shiro’s mind as he watched realization dawn over Lance’s face.

“Aw, buddy, that’s great! Good for you, man!” Lance sat up, stretching. “Glad you finally worked up the courage to come out. I mean,” he laughed, “with all the shit you’ve been through recently, it probably feels like a relief to get that off your chest, right?”

Shiro looked at the radiator, wondering if there wasn’t some way to clip through the floor of the Black Lion and be reabsorbed into her consciousness. “I’ve been out since I was ten years old.”

“Keith is gay too,” Pidge added, smiling like it was her birthday. Shiro gave her a sharp look, only for her to shrug. “What? It’s not like it was a surprise.”

“Oh, wow,” Lance said, his grin looking almost predatory as he reached over Allura and patted Keith on his leg, “this is a happy day.”

Keith closed his eyes. “Get your hand off my knee or I’m going to break your fingers.”

Hunk rolled over and mumbled, “What are we talking about?”

“Sexuality,” Pidge answered, bringing up the display on her pad and ignoring Shiro’s continually disappointed stare. “Keith and Shiro are gay.”

Hunk lifted his head, looking between them both in abject confusion. “Congratulations?”

“You know,” Coran said, voice completely devoid of any trace of sleep, which only made Shiro want to collapse into a ball so tight he winked out of existence, “when I first met you humans, I thought you were a horribly repressed bunch of semi-intelligent apes, but you’ve proven me wrong time and time again with the depth of your conversation and willingness to explore the deeper reaches of your own souls. It’s so encouraging to witness.”

“Are we all sharing?” Hunk hauled himself up, slumping over as he rubbed his face. “Is this a sharing thing?”

Lance shrugged. “Why not?” He braced a hand on his chest, puffing up slightly. “Me, I’m a free-wheeling guy. I see to the heart of a person, not their exterior. It’s the inside that I care about, not what they present to the world.”

Pidge looked at him over the top of her glasses. “You’ve flirted with every girl you’ve ever met since the day I met you.”

His grin soured. “I haven’t flirted with you.”

“And thank god for that.”

“Aw,” Lance cooed, winking at her, “you feeling left out, _Katie?”_

From where she had yet to rise, Allura said, disgruntled, “You do realize that some of us are trying to sleep, right?”

Romelle grunted in agreement, pulling her blankets up over her head and disappearing entirely.

Hunk, by contrast, was looking more and more engaged by the second. “I think Lance might have a point, honestly. Alien girls come in all shapes and sizes and colors and...appendages.” His face grew solemn. “Like, I think I’m attracted to girls, but what’s a ‘girl’ out here in space, you know? Makes you wonder what the point of picking a side is. It’s really confusing.”

Lance nodded and snapped his fingers. “My point exactly. The boundaries of gender are fluid, and I’ve grown to realize that my interests have come to include the entire universe of beautiful, hot people. Why limit myself? Why limit _this?”_ He gestured to his face, which was still slightly puffed up from his earlier sparring lesson.

“Self-restraint,” Pidge muttered.

Allura huffed and rose, white hair tangled and unruly where she’d slept on it. “Is this a practice in human culture? Designating attraction based upon the gender one identifies as? Curious.”

Coran tapped his chin, considering. “Especially considering humans don’t even seem to have that many. You have what, three? Maybe four?”

“I think we just have the two,” Hunk answered, looking more and more troubled by the second, “and then everything else is sort of contained in another category? Is that right?” 

“I’ve never really seen the point,” Pidge said, frowning. “It’s not like sex and gender are connected anyway. It’s a vestigial taxonomy left over from early human society when our brains needed to sort things into categories so we wouldn’t get eaten by saber-toothed cats and kept popping out offspring. It doesn’t mean anything any more.”

“So you aren’t exclusively attracted to men?” Hunk asked Allura, who was nodding along to Pidge.

Allura scoffed. “Of course not. Alteans aren’t bound by such trivial constraints.”

“Speak for yourself,” Romelle said, muffled under her blankets. “If an erect penis came within five feet of me, I wouldn’t hesitate to chop it off.” Her hand shot up into the air, miming a knife as she slashed it sideways.

Hunk tensed, looking as if he didn’t know whether to move away from Romelle or stay perfectly still. 

“All right,” Lance said, “Pidge, your turn. What are you?”

Pidge didn’t look up. “Not interested.”

“Enough,” Keith snapped, causing all of them to startle. Privately, Shiro was impressed that he’d managed to say anything at all. He’d resigned himself to listening to this conversation until the universe succumbed to an eventual heat death. “I mean...this is great, and all. Good...team bonding, but I think it’s time we tried to get to sleep. We’ve got a long day tomorrow.”

Shiro purposefully did not look at Keith while he laid down, trying not to indulge in the weird tension which had settled into the base of his stomach. He turned, only to catch sight of Pidge’s holopad, pointed directly at him.

“Were you...recording?” he whispered.

Pidge pursed her lips, slinking down on the other side of the wolf to avoid his glare. “It’s been three years since Matt’s seen me. I wanted to give him a present when we reunite.”

“Then why were you filming _me_?”

She was silent for a moment, before she said, unconvincingly, “He’s...your friend, and he misses you?”

“Forget it.” Shiro closed his eyes, firmly refusing to think about anything that had happened in the last fifteen minutes, regardless of the confusing swirl of emotions currently forming in the back of his mind. “I don’t want to know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my god this chapter just ran away with me. Couple of disclaimers; I don't actually have any hard and fast headcanons about the sexuality of the team, and please don't take this as me judging anyone who portrays them differently. I am a ship and let ship girl, myself. I also had a bit of a struggle describing Shiro's complicated feelings surrounding his own body and autonomy and the lingering feelings he has from his disease. I'm fully aware that I might have stepped into it a few times. He's difficult. I love him, but his voice is hard for me to get right, and I apologize for any clunkiness. Finally, this chapter is a confusing mess of feelings, so excuse the rambling. I love Shiro a lot, and I think my heart just exploded all over the page. 
> 
> Love you all, and I wanted to thank everyone who's been so kind and welcoming! It's always nerve-wracking entering a new fandom (especially one with the...reputation that Voltron has), but you've been lovely and I'm so glad I finally caved and wrote for these boys. I'll try to get the next chapter up a bit sooner, but I'm gonna be honest, this fic might turn out to be much longer than I originally intended. <3


	5. all that I could ever be

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ["Surrender" by WALK THE MOON](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO8QTlAwFT0&index=6&t=0s&list=PLYYP1CurSOrQN19BJORz1n-v3S1ExXZ_X)

Shiro had wondered what it would feel like to step back onto Earth, to feel it under his feet, to breathe in the parched, lightly-ozonated air outside the Garrison where the desert met the irradiated heat of a planet a few degrees hotter than it should have been. He’d thought about how he might smile at the sunlight, and look out over the place he’d called home for so many years. 

That singular morning he’d crashed back in its atmosphere still felt like a dream, in all the ways that counted. A momentary haze of hallucination and panic and blistering, lovely familiarity. In the desert. In Keith. Even, however frustrating, in the Garrison strapping him to a metal gurney. One beautiful breath before he was pulled back under the churning waves of his new life. 

He’d gotten used to space. He’d even come to love the chaos and adventure and non-dying, non-clone parts of it. He’d imagined getting up and out into the vast cosmos for so long, he often wondered if he wasn’t convincing himself it was better up there than down on the planet which had grown so insignificant in the years since he’d left for Kerberos. 

In the two months after being brought back to life, Shiro had gone in circles about whether he was actually excited to return… _home_.If it even was his home anymore. He wasn’t the same person who had left. Spiritually, he’d changed, emotionally, mentally—connecting to a force which was, in essence, magic, and fighting a rebellion against an empire poised to take over the entire universe had a way of making all your old hopes and fears seem a bit small in comparison to a universal fight of good versus evil. He wasn’t even in the same body he’d left with. He was, _literally_ ,a different person. There was no part of him which had breathed Earth’s air and felt Earth’s sunlight warm his skin. He had no tether to the planet which had borne him. He didn’t even have much family, apart from a few distant cousins and any lingering personal attachments to the Garrison. Adam was the only person he actually wanted to see who still lived here. Maybe Iverson and Mrs. Holt. A few of his other instructors. But there was nothing tying him to that pale blue dot in an insignificant solar system in a galaxy that wasn’t even approaching adolescence compared to the rest of the universe. 

In his more anxiety-filled moments, Shiro worried about what he _wouldn’t_ feel when he finally stepped out of one of the lions and was faced with Earth, the whole, huge, tiny expanse of her. That sense of place, of purpose. Any kind of recognition.

He should have known it would be simpler than he’d built it up to be. 

He also should have guessed that he’d arrive not with an easy landing and a gathering of officials waiting to greet him and the rest of Team Voltron, but crammed into a Galran fighter as he crashed into Earth. If he’d learned anything during his time in space, it was that every entrance he made from now on would be either bloody or accompanied by a lot of explosions.

When he finally extricated himself from the rest of the team and stumbled out onto the hard-packed dirt and stone, nose filling with a disappointingly normal smell of heat and desert and a smoking spaceship, he nearly missed it. The moment he returned to Earth. It should have been important. It should have struck him like it did the others. Hunk’s eyes got wide and glassy as he looked out over the vista. Allura’s smile was tense, as if she were looking for the ghost of Altea in the unfamiliar outline of the rocks and the distant city. Lance laughed, braced his hands on his hips. Even Pidge let out a relaxed giggle, just shy of fearful, as she adjusted her glasses.

He allowed himself only one brief look at Keith, whose eyes were soft. His face was open, not with longing or happiness, but with a distant kind of relief. A familiarity he couldn’t help but show in the relaxation of his shoulders. 

Shiro looked away before any of the others could see the hollowness he felt. The lack. There was nothing here, only the worry that he _should_ feel something. Some attachment. He had a moment of idle panic where he wondered if, in all the trauma he’d been through in the past few years, something hadn’t been fried in the part of his mind which housed his connection to Earth, to what was supposed to be his home. 

It was only when the wind changed, and brought with it a different kind of smell, that of loss and long-burning fires, of vacancy, of actual fear in the air, that Shiro finally felt something. And it wasn’t relief. It wasn’t longing. 

It was anger. 

The desiccated corpse of Platte City loomed like jagged teeth against the grey horizon, a smoking wreck which had once housed nearly two million people. From their vantage on a cliff, they should have been able to see cars on the roads, transports flying through the air. There should have been lights and sound and the chaos of humanity buzzing through their little hive. 

But there was nothing. It was dead. A city of ghosts and rubble.

And Shiro felt the first stirrings of certainty in his gut at the sight. Sendak had done this. He had destroyed this city, and who knew how many others across the globe. He had blasted it apart and left the wreckage as a warning. It was so barbaric, so disdainful, that Shiro had to fight the urge to clench his jaw to keep from screaming. 

“We need to get moving,” Keith said, voice hard, devoid of any of his momentary relief. Shiro might have killed Sendak just for that, really. “Lingering out in the open like this is just tempting fate.”

Uncharacteristically quiet, the team began to move out, everyone summoning their bayards in readiness. 

Shiro hadn’t missed his bayard once since coming back from death, glad to see the end of it when Keith became the Black Paladin, but staring down at this burnt-out husk of a city, he wished he had something to fight with. Something that would reflect the steely anger building in his chest. 

“Shiro?”

He looked down to see Pidge waiting beside him with a tense expression. Keith was watching him too, as if he could tell what was going through Shiro’s mind. He probably could. If anyone in this universe knew him better than he knew himself, it was Keith. 

“Sorry,” he murmured to Pidge, forcing himself to fall into step beside her. 

“Do you think it’s all…like this?” she asked, hands closing tight around her bayard. Nervous. “The whole world?”

Shiro didn’t say yes. Didn’t say that it was probably worse, that if it was this bad here, the rest of the planet was most likely unrecognizable. Platte City wasn’t a metropolis by any means. It was one of the smaller cities in this area of the country. If he knew Sendak at all, and he thought he did, the bastard would have focused his attention on the areas most densely populated. He would have cut off any and all resistance he met in the first few hours of the invasion. He would have targeted New York, Vegas, Los Angeles, Detroit, Dallas, and that was just in the continental United States. He would have done it just to demoralize the rest of the country, to show that there was no countermeasure to the kind of power he wielded. 

He would have obliterated everything else. 

But Shiro didn’t say that, because in his anger, he knew one perfectly clear truth. 

“We’ll fix this,” he said, low and certain. “That’s why we’re here.”

His eyes found Keith over the heads of the other paladins, still watching him. Between them passed an understanding, in the narrowing of his eyes, the hardening of his long, sharp jaw. It was the first time Shiro saw his scar and didn’t think of his own guilt. All he saw was Keith, feeling the same anger and need for retribution that he felt. And Shiro _felt_ ,so strongly, that for a moment, he knew in one instant that this body, whether or not it belonged to him, wanted the same thing. 

To take Earth back. 

 

— ✩ —

 

The skirmish in Platte City and ride to the Garrison only served to sharpen Shiro’s certainty, though he couldn’t help but try and situate his disparate self in the ATV, running his fingers over the side armrest, feeling the familiar rev and throttle of engines that were improved, clearly, but just the same as he’d left all those years ago. His eyes caught the distant outline of mountains, recognized the same view he’d looked upon for almost a decade, and held his breath. Counting the moments until he saw the buildings which had raised him, the vast sky which had watched over him as he learned to fly. 

It was all painfully familiar, except for the large orange particle barrier stretched in a dome over the entirety of the Garrison compound.

“Yeah, we’re proud of that one.” 

The cadet beside him laughed—Rizavi, she’d told him in the quick departure from Platte City. Shiro remembered the laugh, paired it with dark purple hair and a name attached to impressive sim scores. _Nadia_ ,his mind supplied. From Lance and Keith’s class. An attentive, over-eager student. 

Coran sniffed from the back seat. “It looks remarkably stable for a barrier not powered by crystalline energy.”

“We’ve had to make do from Altean designs,” Rizavi said, eyeing Allura, Romelle, and Coran in her rearview mirror. Her eyes might have been a bit wide, but she was handling the strangeness of meeting another species remarkably well. “Commander Holt’s a genius. Wait until you see the MFE’s.”

“MFE’s?” Shiro asked.

Rizavi grinned. “Mecha Flex Exofighter, sir. You’re looking at one of their pilots. The best one. Even if Griffin will say otherwise.”

“Griffin,” Shiro repeated, the name dredging up a distant memory, matching it with the face of the other cadet who had saved them in Platte City. “James Griffin?”

“Yep. That’s our squadron leader. Biggest head in the Galaxy Garrison.” She coughed. “Respectfully, of course, sir.”

He didn’t miss the way her eyes flicked to him, and then down, to where his right arm should have been.

Shiro frowned, looking forward. James Griffin. He remembered the young man, vaguely. Decent scores, but determined. Had been shortlisted for a leadership track. Also the same class—and the kid who’d baited Keith, almost getting him kicked out. Right. So that explained the sullen glare and strange hostility back in the city.

It was easier to think about this than the strangeness of being addressed so formally after so long. _Sir_.The honorific didn’t feel like it belonged to him anymore, and he was surprised the cadet even knew who he was, beyond that pilot who’d been killed in the Kerberos mission. He’d just assumed he’d been stripped of all rank the moment he escaped from the Garrison. Or, kidnapped, he supposed, by a bunch of unruly cadets. 

But he supposed lots of people knew his name now. Sam must have explained what they’d done in the years since leaving Earth. 

“Although,” Rizavi added, snorting, “I guess now that McClain’s back, Griffin will be demoted from leader of the egomaniac club. Is he really one of the paladins of Voltron? You’re all not playing some practical—”

“Lance McClain is one of the most capable men I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting,” Allura said coldly, eyes cutting forward. “He is a brilliant pilot, an expert marksman, and brave beyond compare. He was also the first paladin to be chosen by his lion in over ten thousand years, so I would show a little more respect, if I were you.”

Rizavi blanched, hands tightening over the wheel.

Shiro had to fight his smile. “We’ve all changed, Cadet Rizavi. Give us a chance before you write us off.”

“Of course, sir—m’am,” Rizavi murmured. “I didn’t mean to offend anyone. I’m sorry.”

“That’s quite all right,” Allura said, voice sharp. “Just ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

Romelle hid a snort under a poor imitation of a cough. Pidge was getting to be a bad influence on her. 

The tension grew uncomfortable as the rest of their ride progressed in silence, but luckily they arrived at the Garrison only a few minutes later. Large hangar doors released to allow them entry through an impressively built tunnel in the particle barrier, reassuring Shiro that maybe they had a fighting chance after all. If Sam had done all of this while they were gone… 

The second set of doors opened, and Shiro leaned forward as the compound stretched out before him. It had been reinforced and expanded, with weapons turrets and new buildings supplementing the old. The Galaxy Garrison had already been one of the foremost military compounds in the world, but this rivaled some of the Galran installations he’d seen during his time in space. 

Any sense of uncomfortable familiarity was swept away in the knowledge that he hadn’t been the only one to change in the past few years. He wouldn’t be trying to fit himself back into his old life at all. 

Maybe he should have felt guilty about his relief, but there wasn’t enough time before they had stopped and were being greeted by the leaders of the last defense of Earth. Iverson was stoic, but Shiro could tell he felt horrible about the last time they’d met. The old man might come across as gruff and tough, but he’d gotten to know the gentler man underneath, the man who had shared a drink of expensive scotch the night Shiro had been selected for his first mission off-planet, the man who had fought for him when higher ups tried to argue that he was unfit for duty because of his disease. 

The crushing hug he got from Colleen made his heart hurt, reminded of his own parents, long-dead now, but lingering at the front of his mind as he watched Lance reunite with his family, and Hunk grow uncharacteristically somber at the absence of his. 

Shiro tried not to look for another face, the only other face, really, that he’d expected to see. He didn’t know what he would say to Adam. So many years separated them now. So much had changed. He wasn’t hoping for anything, he didn’t _want_ anything, not in that way. But he wanted to apologize. He owed Adam that much. Maybe nothing else, but definitely that much.

He found himself hovering next to Keith, the only other person besides Hunk who didn’t have anyone else to greet them. 

“This is weird,” Keith muttered, looking distinctly uncomfortable as they made their way into the compound, following Iverson and Sam down corridors which had been expanded and enhanced, layered with technology that was strangely reminiscent of what they’d gotten used to, and yet still an echo of everything they’d left behind. Like two worlds smashed into one. Luckily, Allura and Coran were taking up all of Iverson’s attention, leaving Shiro to acclimate in his own time. 

“Really weird,” Shiro agreed. He looked at Keith, saw the deep furrow in his brow. “You okay?”

He looked at Shiro in surprise. “Yeah, of course.”

“Just checking. You seem tense.”

“That’s because I _am_ tense.” Keith’s mouth twitched. “You worry too much.”

“Pretty sure I worry the necessary amount, considering everything we’ve been through.” As they turned a corner, he caught some of the cadets watching him pass. Eyes followed them all, wide and hopeful, some frightened, some skeptical, but they seemed to linger on Shiro, on the absence of his arm and his white hair. He wasn’t vain, not by any stretch of the imagination, but he’d be stupid to think they weren’t ogling the change in him. He’d had barely a scratch on him before, and now he looked like an old man with a scar over his face and a missing arm. He just didn’t like the reminder. 

“Be nice if everyone could stop staring,” he muttered, a phantom twinge aching where his right hand used to be.

Keith snorted. 

“What?”

“Come on, you should have gotten used to that before you left.” At Shiro’s blank look, Keith continued, “You were the golden boy for years before you went and became the savior of the universe. People are going to stare at you. Plus, you’re _you_ ,so…” Keith trailed off with a shrug. 

Shiro hesitated, something tight and buoyant building in his chest. “What does me being _me_ have to do with anything?”

“Don’t be an idiot.” Keith glanced at him, before looking away. “You know you’re good looking.”

Heat rose up Shiro’s neck, making it difficult to look anywhere except directly in front of him. If he tripped and stumbled now, he didn’t think he’d be able to get back up, which would invalidate any and all confidence the Garrison had in his ability to help them. “Oh. Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Shiro tried to think of something to say in response. He had a feeling that Keith might not appreciate Shiro’s opinion on what _he_ looked like, but that was the only thing currently sitting in the front of his mind. Shiro wasn’t the only one getting long stares from his old classmates. “So…how was the ride with Griffin?”

Keith’s expression went carefully blank. “It was fine.”

“Right. Well. If you get the urge to start punching anyone, let me know.”

Keith rolled his eyes, but there was a hint of a smile in his voice. “Thanks.”

Shiro grinned. “I only meant that I would back you up.”

“And ruin your sterling reputation?”

“For you? Of course.” 

Keith turned to look at him, an intensity in his eyes that made Shiro’s chest tighten. 

Shiro shrugged, trying banish the creeping heat from his face. With everything else going on, it was ridiculous that he still couldn’t hold Keith’s gaze without losing all sense of his own wits. “Like you said,” he murmured, trying for a casual smile. “We save each other. It’s our thing.”

Keith’s eyes went soft. The corner of his mouth lifted. And if Shiro had any sense of self-preservation at all, he would have looked away. He would have broken the tension building between them. But he didn’t, clearly, and so he just continued to stare until he nearly walked directly into Pidge. 

Iverson interjected at that point, directing them toward a wing the Garrison had cleared out for them to stay in for the time being until they were reassigned. Shiro was glad he wasn’t being forced to stay in his old room. Not only was it full of too many memories of the man he’d been before, he couldn’t imagine sleeping separate from the rest of Team Voltron. They’d been together, for the most part, for over a year. There was also the question of what their role would be now. If they would be reabsorbed into the Galaxy Garrison and its rank and file, or if Voltron would remain autonomous. 

With a pang, Shiro realized that he was no longer included in that estimation. He wasn’t a paladin anymore. He had no place, really. 

That truth only grew more obvious the moment he slipped on the officer’s uniform someone had laid out for him on his small Garrison bed in his small Garrison room. It was scratchy and stiff, and smelled like standard issue detergent—faintly of lemon. He’d once found the smell comfortable, familiar, but now it was just another reminder that he didn’t fit anywhere he’d used to. It was a smell which belonged to a younger man, who’d been whole, and less tired.

A knock sounded on his door, and he tugged on his shirt, frowning at the long sleeves of his jacket. He’d have to ball the right one into a knot, or something.

He swiped the door open, only to freeze when he saw Keith leaning in the doorway. 

Where the old uniform had never really fit Keith as a cadet, being somewhat smaller and thinner than his peers, it now laid over his larger frame with an ease that emphasized his long limbs, that made the uniform look sleek and stylish and not like a traffic cone turned into clothes. Shiro had the intense sensation that his mind was trying to smash the two images together—older, taller, more handsome Keith and the uniform, and was just coming up with confused lust.

“I found these in one of my drawers and figured you might want them.”

Shiro cleared his throat, pulled his eyes from the area around Keith’s hips which tapered into a tight V. “What?”

Keith straightened, holding up his hand, flashes of metal catching the soft light. “Pins. For your right sleeve. Unless you wanna walk around like a scarecrow with your sleeve flapping everywhere.”

Shiro laughed, the sound hitched. “Pretty sure I’m closer to a tin man, at this point.”

Keith frowned. “That’s the one without the heart, right?”

He nodded. 

“Then that’s not you.”

Shiro was forced to agree when said heart decided to flip uncomfortably in his chest. 

Keith seemed to be trying hard to hold his gaze, the silence between them going taut.

“Oh, right.” Shiro coughed. “Ah, thanks.” He shrugged on his jacket as best he could, wincing when it took him a while to straighten it out. “Bit bigger than I remember it being.”

Keith’s mouth tightened as he stepped forward to help Shiro. “You could probably stand to gain a few pounds.”

Shiro let him pin his right sleeve while he buttoned his jacket, trying to remind himself that there was nothing wrong with letting Keith help him. That this was totally normal. That Keith’s proximity did not simply serve to remind Shiro of how tall he was now, and how long his hair had gotten—falling gently over his collar in way which made Shiro want to brush it off and curl his fingers into it. He was also having a hard time not looking at the pins Keith held in his mouth, the way it made his lips purse. 

“I thought I looked good,” Shiro said, trying to keep his voice level. 

Keith’s hair fell over his face as he scowled, tempting Shiro in a way which seemed a bit cruel, all things considered. “Don’t push it.”

“And he says I’m the one that worries,” Shiro managed, voice coming out tense and weird. Keith was barely touching him, and though there was no feeling left in the metal nub of his arm, Shiro couldn’t help but hold perfectly still. 

“I can stitch this for you later, if you want.”

Shiro looked down at the folded fabric as Keith stepped back, surprised at how neat it looked. “You know how to sew?”

Keith shrugged, throwing one unused pin onto the empty desk on the other side of the small room. “You pick it up quick when most of your clothes are hand-me-downs or bargain bin finds.”

Before Shiro could respond, Keith straightened and ran his hand through his hair, pushing it off his face—and Shiro had to fight not to let out an audible whine. 

_Brother. Brother. Brother_ ,he reminded himself, forcing his hand to unclench. The repetition was not helping, however, because now he was faced with the undeniable fact that Keith in a Garrison uniform was going to be the death of him. 

Keith cleared his throat, stepping back and turning around. “Anyway, I’m not a master seamstress or anything, but—”

“That’d be gr-eat.” Shiro’s eye twitched at the stumble. _He thinks you’re his brother._

He was saved by Lance appearing in the open doorway, looking thoroughly disgruntled. “How come we have to wear the orange monstrosities while Shiro gets an officer’s uniform?”

“Because he’s an officer, dumbass,” Keith muttered, moving past him to join the others where they were congregating in the hallway. 

“Aren’t we all kind of officers now, though?” Lance scowled at the back of Keith’s head. “I mean, we’ve saved the universe a few times. You’d think that would warrant a promotion or something. Shiro, you should talk to Iverson and see if we can’t get honorary ranks.”

“Hmm?” Shiro looked at Lance, trying not to wonder where the sudden, visceral, and frankly, _disturbing_ attraction to Keith in a uniform had come from. He hadn’t gotten hot and bothered over uniforms before. The paladin armor, sure—he was a gay man with _eyes_ , he couldn’t not see the appeal—but not in the very specific way he was struggling with now. 

Was it just Keith? How many other things would be ruined for him if he saw Keith wearing them?

Dimly, he realized that Lance was just staring at him, waiting for some kind of response. 

“Oh—I’m not sure. We still don’t know where Voltron’s going to fit with the Garrison. The paladins might become a separate force entirely. I can’t see Allura being comfortable with Voltron getting assimilated into a human-run military.”

“Right,” Lance said, grinning, “so we shouldn’t have to wear these stupid uniforms anymore. We should have different uniforms. _Cooler_ uniforms. We’re independent contractors. Technically, the Garrison should be paying us. I feel like we should negotiate our involvement here, and we might come out on top with some interesting perks. Maybe private shower privileges. Commissary comp.”

Pidge joined them, frowning. “Are you going to blackmail the Galaxy Garrison by withholding Voltron’s aid, Lance?”

“What? Of course not.”

“That’s not very patriotic of you.”

Lance looked beseechingly at Keith and Shiro. “Guys, tell her I’m not going to blackmail the Galaxy Garrison.”

“I’m really disappointed in you, Lance,” Keith said with a straight face. “I can’t believe you’d think of blackmailing the Galaxy Garrison.”

Shiro just smiled. 

Lance pointed menacingly at Keith. “I’d be very careful about how much you taunt me, Kogane. I know things. _Things.”_

Pidge straightened her glasses with a scoff. “The extent of the things _you know_ could not fill a betamax, Lance.”

“All right, we’re going to stop this cute little joke you all have about me being stupid right now or I’m gonna get angry.” He narrowed his eyes and glowered at Keith. “And you won’t like me when I’m angry.”

“I don’t like you now.” 

Lance got this look on his face like he was readying himself for war, took a deep breath, opened his mouth—and froze at the sight of Allura walking up behind Keith, wearing the same orange cadet uniform as everyone else. Shiro saw the moment Lance’s brain made the connection, and then promptly stopped working. He made a strangled noise, face darkening as he blushed, finger still hanging in the air. 

“Lance, are you all right?” Allura asked, concern furrowing her brow. “Are you all giving him a hard time?”

Lance managed to close his mouth, but his expression remained pained. 

Shiro had never sympathized more with him than he did in that moment. 

Allura looked away, trying to look casual, but failing. “It’s just such—what is the human expression—low hanging fruit?”

Pidge cackled as Lance deflated. 

“I hate you all,” Lance muttered, shooting furtive looks at Allura out of the corner of his eye. “I’m not the stupid one. That asshole _Bob_ is the stupid one.”

“Careful, Number Four,” Coran warned as he joined them all, clapping him on the back. “You never know when Bob might be listening.”

“Number _Four?”_ Lance spluttered. “I thought I was Number Three!”

“Keith got bigger during his time near the quantum abyss, which means you are now the fourth tallest paladin. Thus, Number Four.”

“What about Allura?”

“I would never dream of calling Princess Allura anything but her name or title.”

Lance threw his hands in the air. “Should I just leave? Would that be better for you all? I’m not super keen on being a metaphorical, and literal— _Pidge_ —punching bag for the rest of my natural life.”

Allura gave him a soft smile. “If you stop rising to the bait, they’ll stop teasing you. I, for one, would hate to see you leave, Lance.” She pressed a hand to his arm before walking forward, meeting Shiro’s gaze with a wink which might have looked casual, if there wasn’t a furious blush rising over her cheeks. 

Lance sagged and his face took on a beatific expression, gaze following Allura as if pulled by a string. “After serious consideration,” he said in a dreamy voice, “I’ve decided to stay with Voltron. For the good of the team.”

Keith smirked. “How generous of you.”

“For the record,” Pidge said, steering Lance around the corner of the hallway when he looked like he was about to walk into the wall, “I will never stop teasing you, but it’s not because I dislike you. Quite the opposite.”

“It’s how the Holts show their love,” Shiro added. “Matt frequently, ah, I think the term he used was, ‘roasted’ me.”

Lance gave him an absent smile. “I am in a very good mood right now, Shiro, or I would be jumping on what you just said like a rabid dog. I want you to know that.”

They found Hunk already waiting with Iverson at the end of the hall, arms crossed and eyes distant. Whatever Iverson had just told him, it hadn’t eased his anxiety about his family.

Iverson straightened at their approach, giving Hunk an apologetic look before he said, “Debriefing in thirty minutes. Sorry we couldn’t give you all more time to relax, but we’re on a tight schedule. Patrols have spotted increased Galra activity not more than thirty miles from our current location. Sendak knows you’re here. We’re running on borrowed time.”

Shiro’s jaw clenched, his good mood sliding back behind the practiced calm of readiness. “Of course, sir. We’re ready to help however we can.”

Iverson grimaced at him, looking distinctly uncomfortable. “There’s…something I need to tell you, Shiro. Before the debriefing, I think.”

That well-honed sense of imminent danger in the back of his mind pinged, but he simply nodded. 

Keith took a step in his direction, concern flashing in his eyes, only to stop when Iverson held up a hand. 

“This is private, Kogane.”

Keith frowned and looked to Shiro. “You want me to come?”

His tension unspooled a bit, warmth leaking into his chest. “It’s okay,” Shiro said with what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “I’ll meet you at the debriefing.”

Keith didn’t look convinced, but after a moment he stepped away to follow the others, sending one last look of suspicion toward Iverson. 

“And I thought he was terrifying as a cadet,” Iverson muttered, watching Keith with a torn expression. 

Shiro swallowed his immediate urge to defend Keith, knowing the old man felt guilty over how he’d treated him. “He’s grown up a lot. We all have,” he added quietly. 

Iverson met his gaze, grimacing. “This…may be a mistake, Shiro, but—I feel like I owe you the truth. Now, rather than later.”

Shiro’s sense of impending dread only heightened, tightening his chest, making his body ready for whatever next came out of Iverson’s mouth. “What is this about, sir?”

The old man sighed. Shook his head. “It’s about Officer Walters. It’s about Adam.”

 

— ✩ —

 

Shiro made the long walk back to his room in a kind of trance. 

The debriefing had gone…well, he thought. Sonda clearly didn’t trust them farther than she could throw them, but she wasn’t actively fighting against them. That had to count for something. Everything else, the walk through the extensive underground bunker and engineering dock, seeing the Atlas sitting amidst rigging like the dead body of a whale washed up on shore—it had all felt like it was happening to someone else. Shiro was only glad that he’d gotten used to acting apart from himself the past few months. He thought he’d fooled everyone into thinking he was okay. That he was handling it. 

He wasn’t. Not at all, but he didn’t have much of a choice. He couldn’t be anything other than okay. Not anymore. Not with Sonda watching him with her hawklike gaze, not with the leaders of the world looking to him for answers. Not with everyone hanging on his every word, waiting for him to put up a good, confident front. 

He couldn’t fall to pieces over the death of a man he’d once loved. He couldn’t. Not until he was alone. 

_Don’t expect me to be here when you get back._

He’d known the universe was uncaring. There was no way to live through what he’d lived through and think it anything other than a random collection of freak accidents and chance occurrences. The good sometimes balanced the bad. Sometimes he was able to see meaning in the trajectory of his life. Sometimes it was enough to accept that he was a small part of a universe which was bigger and more inscrutable than he could have ever comprehended, had he not held onto his consciousness past the point of death and beyond. 

He’d never thought the universe was cruel.

But he didn’t know how else to explain the horrible irony of this situation. Shiro had survived, despite all odds, despite his genetic cards being stacked against him from the start, despite fighting a war, despite literally _dying_ ,only to come back to Earth and find that Adam… Adam was… 

Shiro’s eyes burned with unshed tears as he rounded the corner to the hall in front of his new room. He just needed to lay down. To scream. To drown himself in a shower until he wrung every bit of this horrible self-loathing from his gut that was making him want to vomit.

“Shiro?”

He came to an abrupt stop, looking through his swimming gaze to see Keith hovering outside his door. 

Conflict spread through his chest like a virus—relief at seeing him, at wanting to sink onto his knees and cry while Keith held him, just like he had on that asteroid in the middle of a galaxy billions of lightyears away from Earth. Guilt, horrible, crushing guilt, because he hadn’t thought about Adam in months, and he _had_ thought about Keith, constantly. And here he was, wanting to seek comfort from one while the other was— _dead_. And he’d died before Shiro could apologize for being a selfish ass. 

They wound through his brain, making it hard to think, and he just stood there, staring at Keith, unable to see a way forward. 

“What’s wrong?” Keith asked, stepping toward him, hand already raising. 

“Nothing.” 

The word came out harsh and cold, but it did what he meant it to do. It stopped Keith like a blow, and it seemed to ripple over his expression. An expression Shiro had only seen once, in a haze of rage and confusion, as a facility went up in flames all around them both. 

He just… He didn’t know what he would do if Keith touched him. 

“I—,” he started, dropping his gaze as he tried to smooth out his voice, “I’m fine. Did you need something?”

Some part of him was screaming that he was pushing Keith away for no reason, that he was just in pain. That none of this was his fault. But it was just—too much for Shiro to handle. Keith staring at him with wide-eyed concerned while the image of Adam’s memorial plaque was still burned into his mind. It felt wrong. Like an insult.

“Hunk and I are going to find out where his family’s been taken,” Keith said after a moment, his voice strained, and only then did Shiro notice that Keith was wearing his paladin armor. “I… I guess I just wanted to see if you were okay before I left.”

A weak laugh escaped from Shiro’s lips. So he hadn’t fooled everyone, then. He should have realized Keith would notice.

“I’m fine, Keith. I’m always fine.”

A pause.

“What did Iverson tell you?”

There was a hardness to Keith’s voice, an anger brimming just under its surface. Anger on his behalf, summoned despite his newfound maturity. 

And maybe that was what pushed Shiro over the edge at last, because Keith’s anger was a thing Shiro had clung to many times. It was, strangely enough, familiar, when everything else seemed a twisted reflection of another man’s life. Keith was familiar. 

Shiro took a few steps forward, making sure to keep his distance, swallowing back the tightness in his throat. “He showed me the new names on the memorial wall. The pilots who died when the Galra first attacked.”

There was silence as Keith seemed to weigh his words. Shiro looked up, trying to keep going even as his mouth refused to form the words. 

It wasn’t pity he found in Keith’s eyes, just a sad kind of understanding. “Adam?” he asked, soft. So wonderfully, horribly soft.

Shiro clenched his jaw against a wave of tears, and gave a short nod. 

“Shiro, I’m… I’m so sorry.”

Shiro nodded again, as it was all he was seemingly capable of doing.

From the corner of his eye, it looked as if Keith were holding himself back. Shiro was grateful. If Keith tried to hug him, he’d crumble. 

“You should go,” Shiro murmured, unable to meet Keith’s gaze. “Help Hunk.”

Keith made no move to leave for a long moment. 

“I’m fine,” Shiro said again, taking a step away, keying in the code for his room. The door opened with soft exhalation of air. “I’ll be fine.” 

The more he said it, the more the very idea seemed to mock him.

He listened to Keith’s steps as they faded away, counting to twelve before a sudden panic gripped him. “Keith,” he called, turning around, voice loud and echoing through the empty hallway.

Keith stopped at once and looked over his shoulder, helmet tucked under his arm. 

_Come back_ ,he wanted to say. _Don’t leave_.“Be safe.” _Please._

_I love you._

He hated how strong the urge to confess was. Hated that it might just be a reaction to learning that Adam was…dead. Hated that it might not. That it might have been coming on for months and months, and _now_ he might be too weak to stop it. That there was any connection at all.

A small smile pulled at the corner of Keith’s mouth. He inclined his head. And then he left. 

Shiro watched him go, frozen in his open doorway, torn between wanting to follow him, to never let him out of his sight again, and to stay standing right where he was until Keith came back. 

He did neither. He walked into his room, shut the door, sat down on the edge of his bed, and let his tears fall. 

 

— ✩ —

 

Shiro spent the next few hours trying to sleep. Trying, and failing. He simply stopped trying when the clock showed 01:00, and began his morning workout early, resigned to a sleepless night. Maybe if he wore himself down, he’d manage to steal a few hours before the briefing in the afternoon. The longer he stayed awake, the more likely it was he’d hear if Keith and Hunk returned.

It was easier to focus on his body, to push himself as hard as he could, to ignore the swirling confusion of fear and concern, of grief and guilt. He was grateful, then, that he’d insisted on spending so many hours doing one-armed push-ups back when he was a cadet. Even if Matt had thought it was an unnecessary skill and had frequently lambasted him for it, Shiro couldn’t deny that it had been useful the past few months. 

He stopped counting after he got into the triple digits, lost track of time as he bent his jumbled up thoughts to the simple burn and flex of his ill-fitting body, so when the ping came from his comms, abandoned on his bedside table, he started badly enough to nearly drop face-first onto the floor. His arm shook as he propped himself up again, sweat dripping down his temples and chest. Rolling onto his back, he stared up at the ceiling for a moment, catching his breath, focusing on calming his shaking body. 

_Keep it together, Shirogane_ ,he told himself, swallowing back the last trace of any feeling into his stomach. _One breath at a time_.

Another ping, this one louder and more urgent, cut through the last trace of self-loathing as he realized what it could mean. What a call in the early hours might imply. 

_Keith_.

He surged upright, fumbling for the comms as he slipped on his clothes. “This is Officer Shirogane,” he barked, old habits taking over. 

_“Shiro?”_

He froze, jacket hanging limp from one shoulder. “Allura? Is everything all right?” He looked at the clock on his wall—03:23. “Are Keith and Hunk—”

_“Everything is fine, why do you… Oh, quiznak. I hadn’t realized the time. I’m so sorry. I must have woken you up.”_

Shiro took a few deep breaths, trying to calm his nerves. “No, that’s… I wasn’t asleep. What do you need?”

Keith was fine. Hunk was fine. Nothing had happened to them. _Keep it together._

_“I was… Well, if you’re awake, do you think you could come down to the Engineering Labs? Room 23C. This might be easier to explain in person.”_

She didn’t elucidate further, and Shiro was left to wonder what could be so urgent that she would want to talk to him at this hour. Maybe she’d learned something about Sendak while combing through his memory banks. Shiro was having a hard time focusing on anything, his thoughts both racing and fogged, like he was sprinting as fast as he could through a bank of mist. 

The room in question was off the main drag of computer banks, tucked away in what looked like a series of storage rooms. Shiro found Allura standing in a dimly lit room with her back to the door. 

“Allura?” 

She turned to give him a tired smile. “Thank you for coming, Shiro. I’m sorry for thinking of this at such a late hour. I would have waited, but I felt it urgent enough to start right away.”

He took a few careful steps into the room, noting with some trepidation the distant look in her eyes, the sadness pulling on her features. “Are you all right?”

She closed her eyes, sighing. “Sendak’s memories were—difficult to bear. They’ve taken their toll on me, but…” She straightened and stepped to the side, gesturing to the table behind her. “They have also reminded me of something my father said once. He told me that there are those with the power to destroy, and those with the power to create.”

Shiro’s eye fell to the table, and for the first time since stepping into the Garrison, he felt his mind go quiet. 

On the table lay a prosthetic arm, white and smooth, looking almost—gentle in its stillness. 

“I will not claim to have the same breadth of knowledge as my forebears,” Allura murmured, stepping close to him, “but I believe I might be able to replace the arm Haggar stole from you. To give you a new start.”

Phantom awareness of his right arm blazed, almost painful. He clenched his jaw. 

“Of course,” she continued, hesitantly, “I understand if you don’t trust my capabilities. My knowledge of Oriande and Altean alchemy is poor—”

He reached out with his left hand, grasping her wrist. Something white hot and roaring was making its way up his throat, and he didn’t trust himself to speak. He just looked at her, eyes brimming with tears. 

Her expression cleared, and she gave him a fierce smile. “It’s the least I can do.”

“It’s a hell of a lot more than the _least_ ,” he managed, voice rough. 

She hummed a laugh, pulled him in for a hug. “You are my family, Shiro. If I can help you, I will. Always.”

“Allura, _thank_ you. I don’t—”

“Say nothing of it,” she whispered, blinking her own eyes of tears. “I think, with the aid of Commander Holt, I could have you with a new arm by this time tomorrow.”

His heart surged to life, kicking adrenaline into his system as if he’d just taken a nosedive. “So soon?”

She nodded, looking back at the prosthetic. “The theory is sound, and I believe it should be a simple matter of replacing the remnants of your Galran arm with this new technology. It’s…difficult to explain, but—”

“I trust you. Let’s do it.”

Her smile faltered. “Shiro, I must reiterate that it’s risky—”

“Allura,” he said, finally managing to get hold of his frantic emotions, “I’ve been at the mercy of doctors and scientists and people who have wanted to study and dissect me my whole life. I’m no stranger to that. I understand the risks. I don’t care.” He met her gaze, certainty pumping through his blood like a drug. “Do whatever you need to do.”

 

— ✩ —

 

By 06:00, Sam had been approached, talking through the procedure with Allura, and all necessary assistant techs had been woken up. Apparently, it was about as simple as Allura had thought it would be, since Sam agreed to do it right away. It was less of an operation than a swapping out of technology. Shiro might be slightly more man than machine, but he wasn’t human enough for this to warrant a full on medical procedure. 

Part of him felt guilty about pushing the procedure so quickly, but he couldn’t wait any longer. If there was a chance he might be of some use again, if he could _help_ again, he wasn’t going to wait. They didn’t have time to be safe. Not anymore. 

By 07:00, Shiro had been sedated, laid down on an operating table, and he drifted into a hazy, tense sleep. 

He didn’t know how long it took, but when he swam back to consciousness, there were four new faces standing with Allura outside the lab where Sam and his techs were working. One in particular was staring so hard through the glass, Shiro was surprised Keith hadn’t melted a hole through it yet. Some part of him registered the fear in his eyes, marked it down as something he would hate himself for later, but he was still swimming with the sedatives and the thought slipped quickly out of his mind. He was too busy trying to pay attention to what Sam was saying about the prosthetic, and the energy source, how it was the most powerful thing they could think of, and it would still rely on Shiro’s own electromagnetic field. 

And then the arm powered on, and Shiro was lost to the feeling of having function in his missing limb. 

He’d gotten used to the difference in the Galran arm over the year or so he’d had it. The sensitivity had been advanced, but not close enough to normal for him to forget that his arm had been replaced with a weapon. But it’d been sophisticated enough for him to pretend. 

This new arm was clunky. It responded to his commands, moving quickly, with surprising dexterity, but there was something off in the way it felt. Like there was a slight delay, something interfering with his own spatial awareness. He frowned, spread his fingers apart, rotated the entire arm— 

And then pain lanced through his mind. He screamed, the sound shattering out of him, thudding into his ears. Shouts rose, followed by a loud crash, a frantic beeping—and he was pulled into darkness. 

Laughter echoed around him, hissing and burning like acid where it splashed against his skin. He knew that laugh, knew it as intimately as he knew his own name. It had been a constant, thrumming pulse in his heart for nearly six months.

_Haggar_. 

She was still there, inside his body. He could feel her influence like a virus coursing through his veins, rejecting the new prosthetic, seeking out all the connections and sundering them. Overriding them. Reverting to pain and chaos. The traces of her dark quintessence were traced through his very DNA because she had _made_ this body, and he couldn’t think for the sensation of her in his mind. She was ripping him apart. She was unmaking him. Again. 

A soft click. A light echo.

Sound built. Like a wave of water rushing toward him. He became aware of himself kneeling on the ground, body braced for impact, trying to rid himself of that horrible burning. 

The wave hit and knocked him over. All he knew was brilliant light. Cold. White. It rushed over his skin, flooded into his mouth and mind. Trailed cool fingers down his spine and numbed the frantic beating of his heart. It sought out the black scars of Haggar’s quintessence—and washed them clean.

He didn’t know how long he lay there, in the shallows of water which smelled sweet. Gradually, the lingering darkness brightened, like a veil pulled back to reveal the morning sun. Sky stretched over his head, blue and bright, swirling with pink cosmos, pricks of diamond light. 

The ground solidified into glassy marble. Shiro sat up, the motion easy, so easy he nearly cried with relief. The pain was gone. All that was left of the taint of Haggar’s magic was a memory in the back of his mind. A shadow which would never truly leave him, but had no hold over him now.

He had a thought, distant, and yet poignant, that he might have died again. 

The place he sat in was like the Black Lion’s consciousness. Familiar enough to sense something far greater than himself, to brush it with his mind and come back with awe. A breeze rushed over his face, stirring his white hair over his forehead. 

A growl broke the silence. 

He turned, fear lancing through his chest. A lion stood at the very edge of his vision, where the horizon split the glass from the pastel sky. 

A white lion. 

Awareness cut him clean through, and he opened his mouth.

But before Shiro could say anything, he was pulled from that bright, soft place, and he awoke to the sound of steady beeping. He waited for the unreality of his body to reassert itself. For him to feel the places where he didn’t fit, where his awareness hit a wall not of his own making. 

Footsteps broke the silence. A muffled grunt and a voice calling a name he recognized. Heavy breathing. 

He blinked open his eyes. Caught Allura staring at him in determination. Sam to her side. Keith and Pidge ran into the room, both of them looking more frightened than he could ever remember seeing them. Keith’s eyes were wild, his mouth open on a silent shout, uniform disheveled. Lance and Hunk came in soon after, Lance sporting a forming bruise on his cheek.

The pieces fit together in his brain, but Shiro still waited for that inevitable plummet. For him to remember, physically, what had been done to his body. 

The longer he waited, however, the more he realized—it wasn’t coming. 

Everything was just—quiet.

“What—” He broke off, an image of an open, bright world swimming at the back of his mind. It was gone just as quickly. He wondered if he was just imagining a growl making the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. “What happened?”

No one answered him. 

He looked down and with a jolt realized that the arm was sitting where he’d left it, fingers curling unconsciously. He flexed his hand—and he felt his _hand._ Not a prosthetic. Not an artificial limb, but _his_ hand. There was no normal pull and pulse of muscle or blood, but there was something else, something which felt almost more right than his other arm. 

It felt like an extension of his consciousness, of that sense of being which he’d gained while living within the Black Lion. It was quintessence, pure and focused, breathing alongside his body, cool and calm and certain. 

“I feel strange,” he murmured, the words coming before he could stop them. “I feel _great_.” He looked up. His eyes slid from Keith to Allura—and held at her bare forehead.

Something ancient entered her gaze, reminding Shiro viscerally of the same look he had been given by—some entity? He could barely remember it now, but some part of his mind held on, clung to it. He’d been given something. Something precious. Something which had not been meant for him to receive, and yet _felt_ like his.

“Altean alchemy is rooted in the giving of life,” she murmured, straightening to her full height. “The willing sacrifice of an alchemist.”

“Woah, what?” Lance said urgently. “Allura—”

“The energy source,” she said, giving him a reassuring smile. “I should have realized it wouldn’t be enough to counteract the lingering traces of Haggar’s manipulations. I’m sorry, Shiro. Earthen technology is still woefully unmatched against Galran magic.” 

Shiro hesitated, some part of him still hovering in that place of infinite possibility. “Your circlet.”

Her smile turned sad, and her gaze dropped. “Made up of part of the first crystal my father ever used to power the Castle of Lions.” Her eyes shone. “He gave it to my mother on their wedding day.”

Guilt dimmed the wonderful, free feeling suffusing Shiro’s body. He looked down at his new arm, seeing now the artistry, the fine blue lines circling the human tech, humming with refined power. “Allura, I can’t accept this.”

Her brow arched. “You already have. Or your body has. This is an imprecise science, Shiro, but I know enough of alchemy to be sure that my crystal would not have worked if it, and you, were not in accord. An unwilling host would have rejected the crystal, just as the crystal would have rejected a host who was unworthy of its power.” She stepped toward him, lifting his new arm and turning it over, as if inspecting it. “Besides, even if I wanted to take it back, I can’t now without killing you, probably. The magic is part of you. Removing it might upset the delicate balance of quintessence you now have swimming inside your improbable body.” Her mouth tightened. “And I’m afraid I simply won’t allow you to die to return my family heirloom. You’ll have to swallow your martyr complex just this once.”

Shiro could feel it, the gentle press of her fingers, the patient way she tapped his forearm in approval. 

“You told me to do whatever I had to do,” she murmured, fixing him with a firm look. “I did.”

A knot of tension released in his chest, and before he knew what he was doing, he was up from the table and pulling Allura into a hug. A hug with both of his arms, his body working in concert without any delay or pain.

“Thank you,” he murmured, taking a deep breath, a breath which felt like the first true breath he’d been able to take since waking up in this body. In _his_ body. “Allura, _thank you.”_

“Keep it safe for me,” she whispered, wiping her eyes discretely when he released her. “I wouldn’t entrust it to anyone else.”

He smiled, and looked over at everyone else, noticing for the first time the bags under their eyes, Keith and Hunk in particular. “What time is it?”

“Eight thirty.” Lance tried for a scowl, but he just looked relieved. “So you should be very grateful I dragged my ass out of bed to—” 

Shiro pulled him into a hug too, feeling practically weightless as he laughed. “I appreciate it, Lance.” 

Lance squirmed and tried to duck out of his embrace. “Okay, jeez, please don’t crush me with your new fancy hand. Keith already scuffed me up on his way in here. I’m a fragile boy.”

Shiro turned to Hunk, who was doing his best to smile, but coming up short. “Any news?”

Hunk shook his head, his face uncharacteristically grim. “Nothing good.” 

“We were able to track down Hunk’s family,” Keith said, expression tight, “but the base is too heavily fortified.” He was looking away from Shiro now, hands shoved into his pockets. Some part of Shiro recognized the posture as a red flag, but he was having a hard time keeping one thought in his mind at a time. “We couldn’t get in.”

“Well,” Shiro nodded at Hunk after a moment, “that just means we’ll have to think of a way to get them out.”

“Yeah,” Hunk breathed out in determination, “yeah, we will.”

“I think you all might have time for a small rest before the meeting this afternoon,” Sam said, walking around and placing a hand on Pidge’s shoulder. “From the sound of it, everyone had an eventful night.”

Shiro thanked Sam and the other techs, energy pulsing through his limbs for the first time in two months. He felt like he could fly, he was so free. A weight he hadn’t even realized he’d felt had been lifted from his shoulders, the pressure released from his chest. He knew it was just his imagination, but he thought he might even be able to see and hear more clearly. He was giddy. He was floating. He was smiling way too much to be normal.

The group splintered off, Pidge trailing after Hunk with a determined purse to her mouth and worry in her eyes, Lance and Allura having a quiet conversation at the mouth of the corridor, and Keith— 

Keith was walking beside him, silent. 

Only then, Shiro remembered the fierce stare Keith had been leveling at him when he woke up before his arm went haywire. Remembered his guilt, and his concern. Realized that if Keith had done something this stupid without telling him first, he probably would have broken through the glass at the first sign that anything had gone wrong.

A thought formed in his mind, after the previous night spent turning over his regret at how he’d left things with Adam, his guilt whenever he thought of Keith. 

He’d been too proud once, and it had almost killed him. Even if it was different, if _Keith_ was different, he couldn’t make this mistake again. 

“Hey, can we talk?” Shiro murmured, fighting the urge to reach out for his arm. His new hand clenched and unclenched at his side, a perfect manifestation of the building conflict in his mind. “Alone?”

Keith’s brow furrowed, looking at Shiro in confusion. “Sure,” he said, slowly, following Shiro to his room.

Nerves rose up his throat, brighter and hotter than they’d been only the day before. As if his emotions had been deadened and were now dialed up to their full, brilliant potential. 

Shiro knew that he had no reason to fear Keith, but there was something urgent unfurling within him now that probably had nothing to do with his new arm and everything to do with the feeling he’d been repressing for over a year. 

Things had changed between them, and Shiro had been able to live with that change for the past two months because there were other things to distract him. Things like not fitting into his new body, or into Voltron, or into Keith’s life. Things like his lingering anger and shame over being used as a puppet to hurt the people he cared most about in this universe. Things like fear at arriving home to find that everything was so much worse than he’d imagined it could be. 

Things which, in the span of one night, seemed to have been moved aside, placed into carefully constructed boxes he could address in his own time, when he was ready. It had been a coping mechanism he’d developed to deal with the death of his parents, with the degradation of his body due to his disease. It wasn’t healthy, but it was the only way he’d learned how to live, and now that he felt normal—better, really, than he’d ever felt before, he could see a way forward.

But not if things didn’t change. He couldn’t put Keith into a box. Shiro known that from the moment he’d met him. It was one of the things he loved most about Keith.

He opened the door to his room, realizing with a frown that he hadn’t made his bed before he’d left to see Allura this morning. God, had it only been a few hours ago? It felt like another lifetime.

The door closed, leaving Keith standing in front of Shiro with his arms crossed, wariness in his expression. 

Shiro fought the urge to grimace. His discomfort around Keith, which was really wanting _more_ comfort, had been a constant before he’d been shoved into the body of his evil clone. He supposed it was too much to hope this had been cured by a magic Altean crystal with the rest of him. 

The silence stretched. Keith looked more confused by the moment. “Are you—”

“I’m sorry,” Shiro said in a rush, voice breaking. “I should have told you about,” he waved the prosthetic arm, marveling at its weight—it was next to nothing, lighter than he remembered even his natural arm being, “ _this_.I’m sorry.”

Keith’s face went slack. “What?”

“I knew it was a risk, and I’m not saying I wouldn’t have done it, but… I should have told you. Warned you. For that, I’m sorry.”

For a moment, they stood in absolute silence. It gave Shiro the opportunity to look at Keith without the filter of phantom pain and guilt he’d been holding onto the for the past two months, without the lingering horror of feeling like his body didn’t belong to him. 

He looked tired, but no more than usual. There was something tight about the way he held himself, like he was braced for a fight, ready for an attack. It didn’t make much sense, until Shiro wondered… 

Is this why he felt so strange around Keith now? Because he hadn’t realized that Keith was treating him like a threat? Like something he had to guard himself around?

“You have nothing to apologize for,” Keith murmured, his voice low and rough. 

“I saw the way you looked at me.”

His jaw tightened. “I was worried. You—I didn’t know what was going on. I thought… It doesn’t matter. Everything worked out fine, so. It’s fine.”

“Keith, you don’t have to lie to me to make me feel better.”

He frowned, looking up with a flash of frustration. “I’m _not_. You don’t—owe me anything, Shiro.”

The pain in his voice, the way it seemed to reach out and grab Shiro by the throat, nearly knocked him back. He was moving before he could understand what he was trying to do, reaching up to grab Keith by the shoulders—his new hand hovered for a moment, his mind finally catching up to his body. Keith’s eyes widened and his frame went taut, not with fear, but something else, something that made Shiro almost more hesitant to touch him. 

Something Shiro could almost pretend was anticipation.

Slowly, he placed his right hand on Keith’s shoulder. “I owe you everything.”

Keith’s eyes darted back and forth across his face, brow furrowing in a kind of obstinance which made Shiro’s chest constrict. “Shiro, I—”

“Let me finish, Keith,” he murmured, conjuring the conversation they’d had on that asteroid, when Keith had held him while he cried, had reassured him, and Shiro had let himself crumble in his arms. “You _saved_ me. Not just my life, although you’ve done that more than I had any right to expect you to. More than anyone would expect you to.” Shiro swallowed, trying to keep his voice steady as Keith’s eyes shone. “ _You’re_ the reason I’m still here. Why there’s anything left of me. You’ve kept me _sane_ ,Keith. Yeah, I owe you my life, but I—I owe you my _soul_.You understand that, right?”

His hands tightened, and some part of him knew that he was approaching a line he shouldn’t cross, that there might be fallout if he kept going. That Keith’s lips were parted and there was something dangerous unfolding between them that would not be shoved back inside so easily.

But all Shiro’s tethers had been released and he felt like he was flying. Like he was soaring off a cliff, and all he could see was breathtaking violet eyes. 

“You’re the most important person in my life, Keith.” His voice had dropped, heart racing as he watched color rise over Keith’s pale cheeks. Not for the reason he wanted, but still… “You always will be. Of course I owe you. I’ll try to be better—I _will_ be better. You deserve—”

Keith jerked forward, and for a single, blissful moment, Shiro thought he might kiss him. 

Instead, he pulled him into a crushing hug, burying his face against Shiro’s neck. A tremor ran through his body, and Shiro responded at once. He wrapped Keith in his arms and held him, screwing shut his eyes as he listened to a broken sob shake through Keith’s frame. He _felt_ it, no distance between himself and this body, which was _his_ , and the man who was more precious to him than anything else in the whole universe. 

“I thought—” Keith’s voice was so muffled Shiro barely understood him. “I thought you were going to…”

“I’m sorry,” Shiro murmured, pulling him tighter, wishing there was some way he could go back in time and erase the pain he’d caused Keith. “I’m so sorry, Keith.”

He tried to pour everything into that apology, all his guilt and shame over what he’d done to Keith as a clone, for what he’d neglected to do before that, for lying to him for so long, for letting him think that he was anything less than the single best and most important thing which had ever happened to Shiro in this life or the last. 

_I’m sorry. I’ll do better_ ,he promised himself. 

_I love you._

_I love you._

_I love you._

Keith was the one to pull away first. Shiro had to fight his own desire to hold him tighter, to move his hand to the back of his head, to just—kiss him. 

Keith took a deep, shaky breath, scowling over Shiro’s shoulder as he blinked furiously. “You’re gonna make me go prematurely grey, Shiro.”

Shiro blinked his own burning eyes, and smirked. “We’d match.”

“I don’t think I could pull it off as well, though.”

“You could.”

Keith turned his face to the side, and Shiro stepped back, giving him some space. His cheeks were red, making his scar stand out like a fresh slash over his skin. The muscle in his jaw feathered, hair spilling over his forehead and eyes. 

Shiro wanted to push it back. To cup his face with his hand. To memorize the shape of his lips. To pull him in close and show him exactly how much he was loved. 

His mind and body were finally synced, and it seemed the only thing he could do now was want more of Keith. 

“I wasn’t mad,” Keith murmured. “You don’t have to run everything by me if you don’t want—”

“I want to,” Shiro said before he could stop himself. “It’s…something I want to start doing.”

Keith looked back at him, violet eyes searching. “Okay.” He blinked, and exhaled, and took a step back, seeming to pull himself back together. He ran his eyes over Shiro, gazing down at his new hand. “You feel—good?”

Shiro couldn’t help his smile. “Yeah,” he breathed. “Really good.”

Keith’s smile was slow, but every bit as bright as that world Shiro had visited in the moments before waking to a body which belonged to him again. “Good. That’s—good.”

“Hey,” Shiro reached out for Keith’s hand with his human one, riding on the high he still felt pumping through his blood, “I meant I what I said. I know I’ve been… That things between us have been…weird. I wanna fix it. You’re too important.”

Some voice in the back of his mind told him that this was too much, that he was going too hard, too fast.

But Shiro just…couldn’t summon the energy to care anymore. He’d come too close to losing Keith, to losing himself, so, so many times. If Keith backed away, he’d respect that, but without the haze of recovery dulling his thoughts and tying up the threads of his mind in tangles, he knew what he wanted. Even if Keith only needed him as a brother or a friend, he’d do it. He’d do anything and everything he could to find a place by Keith’s side. To be there as he blazed bright through the universe. To witness it. To miss nothing else. 

Keith’s eyes went soft, his expression slowly unfolding. “You really mean that.”

It wasn’t a question, but Shiro couldn’t help the small twist in his chest at hearing his surprise. _Still_ surprise, after everything they’d been through. Keith still didn’t realize. 

He tightened his grip on Keith’s hand. “More than anything.”

Keith’s lips parted. He took a slow breath. “Okay.”

Shiro smiled. “Okay.”

A thin laugh escaped from Keith’s mouth. Red flushed over his cheeks and he cleared his throat. “Are you…hungry?”

“Ah,” Shiro struggled with the sudden change in topic, “sure. I could eat.”

“I just meant—you’ve been up all night, right? So you’re probably hungry.”

Shiro was still holding Keith’s hand, and so he felt the slight twitch in his fingers. “You’re not tired?”

“Nah,” Keith muttered, sliding his hand from Shiro and brushing his hair back. Shiro followed the movement, drinking it in, knowing he was pushing his luck. “I’m too keyed up. Probably too much to wonder if the cafeteria’s still serving breakfast.”

“I think they could probably make an exception for the saviors of the universe.”

Keith’s brow arched. “You’d use your clout just to get some eggs?”

“That would depend on the number of eggs.”

“Right. I’m sure the cooks are quaking in fear at the return of Shiro the Hero and his bottomless stomach.”

“That’s unfair.”

“I once watched you eat two dozen scrambled eggs in like an hour. I thought Matt was going to have a heart-attack. Two of the cooks started crying because they were so worried.”

Shiro frowned good-naturedly. He hovered for a moment, realizing he was still wearing sweats and a tank-top. “Let me put on some clothes first.”

“That would probably be a good idea,” Keith said, his voice sounding almost tight. 

Shiro looked back at him as he slipped off his tank, telling himself that this didn’t need to be as weird as he was making it. “Hey, you know what I just remembered?”

Keith hummed, still keeping his eyes averted from Shiro as he swapped out his sweats for the pants of his uniform. He’d gotten so used to having only one hand, he wanted to cry at how easy it was now to put on clothes. 

“We’re back on Earth. You know what that means?”

Keith scowled. “You can have more of your disgusting spicy cheetos?”

“No,” Shiro grinned, maneuvering his sleeve around the edge of his prosthetic. The gap was going to take some getting used to. He turned, dropped his voice in proper reverence. “Keith, _coffee.”_

Keith tensed, and then a wide, beaming smile stretched over his mouth. “Oh, fuck. How did I forget about _coffee?_   You think they still have some even after the supply lines were cut off?”

“I think Iverson started stockpiling the moment Sam got back with proof that aliens were coming to kill everyone.”

Keith laughed, the sound jumping and rough. Like he wasn’t used to it. 

Shiro finished with his jacket, pulled Keith along, not realizing until he touched him that it had been with his metal hand. But instead of letting go, of retreating to somewhere safe and separate where they could both build up their walls and go back to whatever they’d been before, Shiro took Keith’s hand, and gave him a questioning look. 

And when Keith didn’t pull away, and returned Shiro’s look with a small, hesitant smile, Shiro couldn’t help his own rough laugh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear I didn't mean to make this chapter so long but here we are. Also I'm sorry. But I did add the slow burn tag, so. You all should have expected it was going to get painful.

**Author's Note:**

> [Spotify Playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/eveninglottie/playlist/3gEVSCIDCkmIVSEhw61Nan?si=9aixKDWATcWuE1WC9yVTPA) || [Youtube Playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYYP1CurSOrQN19BJORz1n-v3S1ExXZ_X) || [Tumblr](https://eveninglottie.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Places you can come and bug me to update:  
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